Friday, August 3, 2012

Friday .....

Today my accomplishments in the kitchen....

Pizza dough made for the weekend and beyond.... It's a recipe that needs to sit overnight and freezes perfectly... Thinking about using it as a product for the local growers Market next year....

Tofu prepped for dinner marinating till five ish....

Sunday, May 13, 2012

New Trip, New Cookbooks

Having friends in Holland to stay with has meant I've been exposed to many great BBC Food shows and one of the ones I hope to catch is The Hairy Bikers. Si King and Dave Meyers in their programs travel, meet cooks, bakers, chefs and everyday people talk about the areas they are in and the food traditions there. This years eight episode show titles Bakation took them to eight EU countries across the continent starting in Norway, across the Lowlands to Germany, eastern Europe, Austria, Italy, France and finally to Spain. I got to see all but the first episode and early in the run got a copy of the accompanying book....The Hairy Bikers Big Book of Baking.

The book includes more the sweets and just bakes items but the main focus is as you might guess bread pastry cakes and the like. I don't think there is one recipe in it that I don't want to take a stab at. So though it's not the first I tried, that being a delicious German Potato Bread (Kartoffrlbrot) I have to post animate from my Stromboli from last week. It's from the Italian chapter where they cooked one for Si's sister who married into an Italian family. A good part of my ancestry come from northern Italy and I spent much of my childhood around my maternal grandmother who was first generation Italian American and who is her working life had been a cook and baker in Tiburon Marin County.

On the Bakation show they usually cooked three dishes and these are on the BBC Food website and can be accessed throughout the world. So the recipe for this Stromboli dough is on there along with the tomato sauce they made. I put fresh mozzarella, fresh basil my own basic pasta sauce and bits of Cumberland sausage on the one I made. I will post links to the BBC site soon but it's simple to google and the taste rewards the time invested in making the dish.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Though I long lamented the era that I was bon in I now think myself lucky... in times past there was not the mixing of cuisine and I fear in times future there will not the the ingredients available through overuse to make all the dishes we can now... I am sad for the past and hope I am wrong for the future... I love cooking and I would share it with al the people I love....