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A Little Luxury For Me

Cooking

Fresh Bread

April 30, 2013 by Erica Hughes 2 Comments

fresh breadFresh bread is an everyday little luxury for me. The smell of baking bread is just divine and if it didn’t make me feel so hungry, I almost feel I could live on that alone. My fresh bread almost always comes from my breadmaker. I set it so it comes in time to present me with a fresh loaf first thing. I find this helps with the gorgeous scent of fresh bread making me hungry, because it’s breakfast time anyway when I get up so I don’t feel hungry for long. There’s something magical about getting up and smelling fresh bread which has been made for you while you slept.

freshly sliced breadAnother thing that I find amazing about making my own fresh bread is that something so tasty can be created from so few ingredients. My normal white loaf, that I make most often, only contains 4 ingredients: water, flour, salt and yeast. They don’t look very promising when you put them into the bread bucket (the bit that the dough goes into that acts as mixing bowl and baking pan), but alchemy is at work to turn these humble ingredients into culinary gold.

My recipe for a simple white loaf requires the following ingredients:

  • 350ml/ 12 fl oz water
  • 500g/ 1lb 2oz strong white bread flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon yeast (the dried, suitable for breadmaker sort)

Put the ingredients into the bread bucket in the order they are listed.  Choose the basic white bread setting for your breadmaker with a bread size of 1.5lb.  Then 3 hours later you’ll have your bread.  Bare in mind that it is difficult to slice when warm, so allow for some cooling time.  I like eating it best when there is still a touch of residual warmth left from the cooking process, but it’s cooled enough to slice fairly easily.  It doesn’t keep for too long, so eat on day 1 or 2 as fresh.  After two days toast it.  The toast it makes is like nectar too.

 

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: basic white loaf, breadmaker, homemade bread, simple white loaf of bread

Making Homemade Chutney

November 24, 2012 by Erica Hughes Leave a Comment

Making Homemade ChutneyThis week I made a batch of homemade chutney.  Some friends gave us some cooking apples from their tree and I’ve been using them for various things.  I’d been putting off making the chutney, but then my Internet connection was playing up so I thought I’ll get on with preserving.

Making homemade chutney involves a lot of chopping: you need to get the ingredients cut up into small enough pieces.  So make a virtue of the need to be engaged in a repetitive task: listen to a radio programme (easy to pick one you like now with the ability to pick one from the last week or so readily available); put on a favourite CD; listen to an audio book; or have a little company to talk to while you work.

I’ve been making homemade chutney for a couple of years now and have been experimenting with various recipes.  This time I made Apple and Onion Chutney which uses up quite a large quantity of apples.  The recipe came from this book called Jams and Chutneys, which was a Christmas present.

What do you like to do when you are chopping up your vegetables for chutney?  Do you have a favourite recipe or a bible of preserving that you use?

Filed Under: Cooking Tagged With: homemade chutney, pickles, preserves

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About Me

ericaI’m Erica Hughes: interested in beauty products as well as being a keen foodie and amateur cook. I write here about my passions in life including good food, fine wine, beauty plus all the little luxuries that make life worthwhile.

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