Tasty bread

Full disclosure before we begin: bread is my favourite food. From bagels to baps, chapati to ciabatta, baguettes to brioche, teacakes to tortillas - in all its wonderful diversity of shapes and sizes, I love it. (Except for that dark one that tastes weird. Pumpernickel? Rye? Whichever, that one's gross.) So I'm not really going to be the most objective judge of this recipe.

I knew two things going into this: 1) that I was going to love it (see above); 2) that it was going to be easy. My mum used to make soda bread from time to time and I was always amazed that something so delicious could happen so quickly. After all, bread is supposed to take hours and be laborious, not 40 minutes and be something a child could do. I mean, look at those ingredients - if that's not the most boring picture we take all year, well, I'm not looking forward to whatever that recipe is.

It's as simple as sift...

...mix...

...and dough. You don't even have to knead it very much - in fact over-kneading is bad for it. And there's no waiting around for the yeast to rise and the dough to proof; the baking soda just makes it happen. Score one for chemistry. Of course, if you mess up your amounts or your mixing, your bread tastes like baking soda and is gross, but hey. Don't mess up.

Cut a cross in it - not just to be fancy, but to let the heat get through to the middle. It's a heavy dough, and easy to undercook. But also to be fancy.

And this is what you get, half an hour later! Bread! Tasty bread! And it really is tasty - in fact I've made it again since, it was so good. (That and we had a lot of buttermilk to get rid of.)

I don't know what's up next, but it probably won't be a bread product. Sigh.

Embrace The Evil Veggies

After devouring that greasy-in-a-good-way soufflé and those sinfully delicious chocolate-filled doughnuts on the same weekend, we were definitely in need of something a little lighter. I have to say that I LOVE this recipe! It’s simple, tasty, healthy, and it even got Robin over his fear of zucchini. Mostly.

Check out these ingredients:

You can probably see why Robin wasn’t too excited to dive into this one at first, but he was willing to be adventurous, and the avocadoes helped a lot. First we chopped, seasoned, and roasted the peppers and zucchini

Then we decided that we might need to invest in a bigger roasting tray. Luckily, we had the classiest of red punch bowls at our disposal.

Those lentils were boiled in broth and then we combined them with the roasted veggies and tossed in sundried tomatoes, avocadoes, basil, chives, and lemon juice.

I knew I would like this salad but I was shocked to see Robin going back for seconds before I had even finished mine! Needless to say, this is a dish worth repeating. In fact, I’m in Denver for work and have been eating out every day, so this is just the kind of fresh, healthy meal I’m craving right now.

Over and out from Denver. Robin’s up next with soda bread!

Ambition thy name is doughnut

It's been pretty smooth sailing so far on this voyage, but let's not get carried away - we haven't exactly been challenging ourselves. And that's by design: starting out with incredibly complex dishes wouldn't have been very smart. If the wheels are going to come off (to mix my metaphors) it's going to be with something like today's adventure: chocolate-filled doughnuts.

There is, after all, an entire industry devoted to selling you doughnuts so that you don't have to make them yourself. They're not something you just whip up on an impulse. And besides, if we all made our own doughnuts, where would the cops hang out?

But we're nothing if not foolhardy - plus, chocolate - so we gave it a shot. First step, making the dough. Flour and sugar were sifted together, then mixed with warm milk and melted butter, plus the all important yeast, which had been waking up in a small dish of warm milk.

With the dough made, we found ourselves with nothing to do for an hour. See above re: not an impulse recipe. Eventually though, the dough didst rise, and we were ready for stage 2: deep frying!

Before it could be fried, we had to cut the dough into "pillow" shapes - as you can see, I use weirdly shaped pillows. But they'll taste just as good!

So far so good, but these aren't just plain doughnuts, they're chocolate filled, so we need to have the filling ready to go when they come out of the pan. Luckily that's just a matter of pouring hot sweetened cream over chocolate chips and stirring. And yes, that's just as delicious as it sounds.

Into the fryer, then! It takes an unreasonable amount of oil to deep fry things, it turns out. Add that to the inescapable feeling that you're going to burn the house down, and you see yet another reason why you just don't do this at home.

Somehow we made it through without even a small fire (a little disappointing), and were left with just one more hurdle: getting the chocolate inside the doughnuts. Did I mention that neither of us has ever used a piping bag before? I think you can imagine the mess; it's amazing that our hands were clean enough to touch the camera at this point.

All's well that ends well, though, and all's even better that ends doughnuts.

Next time, we make up for these empty calories with a lentil and courgette salad - better than it sounds!