Cooking With Richard

I took this photo last week during the cold snap. It’s of a large field next to the house, covered in snow.

Click for the big version!

Here’s another — the enchanted forest:

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Chipperfield Common, covered in snow:

I got a bit lost and had to follow my own footsteps back:

New sink …

Crazy Japanese …. One of them looks like lovely Yuka though.

Something of a lost opportunity. The Two Brewers is a traditional pub in just about the perfect English village setting (yet close to London). With the right owner it could be a great pub, but instead it’s a moderate chain pub with restaurant-cum-hotel pretensions. The food was 5/10, certainly not bad, but nothing of note.

I almost discovered this recipe by accident, by taking very thin, small strips of the pizza dough and frying them quickly in olive oil (over a very hot pan).

Mmmm delicious with home made sprout and sweet potato curry!

After months of wrangling and worry we finally exchanged contracts on our new house. Here it is. The strange raised section with a window on the right is the wretched flying freehold that caused everyone so much trouble:

The lane:

Big garden!

This is where Mito can stay when she comes. Probably when the house was built in the 1920s it was the toilet …

The village common:

Things have been tricky for the past couple of months because of the uncertainty about where we are going to move to, but it’s possible tomorrow we may have some good news …

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(But I thought the same thing yesterday too)

The brawn is tasty, rather like a cold, meaty pâté.

We ate it with home made toast. The only problem is there’s just so much of it, a complete “loaf” of brawn which we won’t ever be able to eat in time. Luckily Hugh has a recipe for fried brawn — we’ll see about that.

Brawn with toast and salad. Everything here is home-produced!

Next time: More spices. This dish will take a large amount of spice because the pig is highly flavoured itself, and there’s such a lot of it. I think I’d want to go with a real recipe next time so we can choose to make it Chinese-spicy and British-spicy. Also more salt for the same reason.

So the pan arrived this morning and it turned out to be a little bit larger than I anticipated:

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Interesting video, how to make porchetta di testa, which is a kind of salami made from a pig’s head.

For Coco-chan:

The recipe was derived from this, quantities doubled, about 3 tbsps of sugar and quite a large amount of parmesan.

Because the bread is quite sweet, it tastes a little like a crumpet when you put butter on top. I note that real crumpets are made with warm milk.

Hello, who’s this big fellow?

More photos after the cut.

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One thing I really should do regularly is to bake bread, partly because I like bread, partly because it tastes much better, and also because it’s much better for you than the salt-filled, fatty rubbish you buy in supermarkets.

This one used my standard bread recipe (520g of strong white bread flour, 400g water) to make a single loaf. I varied it with: 1 large tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and about a tablespoon of finely grated parmesan cheese. Cooking time was approx. 45 minutes at 190-200C.

Next time: double the recipe (to make two loaves), more parmesan.

Sorry, Shika-chans.

N-sama bought it: