Bread making

Sherian gave me a thermomix recipe book and most of the recipes in there look easy. I have tried a couple and they worked well.

The last time I went to a thermomix demo, the demonstrator had brought bread that she had made earlier that morning. Oh my Goodness, it was good. The recipe took five ingredients and everything was thrown into the Thermo (Annie)

I am hopeless at following a recipe! One reason is that i often don't have something so I comprise and a further reason is Warren cant have a few items so again I either leave out or swap. My cooking is more the little bit of this, little bit of that, oh, there we go, add a dash of that.

Annie needs a bit more structure to work so I had the recipe and was prepared to cook to the recipe. Sounds too easy, right?

First recipe called for 1.25 cups of water or 300 gms of water, all good, I got out my measuring cup and measured 3 cups of water. Then the yeast, 7 gms or a small packet , throw that in, 20 gms of olive oil, 500 gms of flour.  Oh, SH........., not 3 CUPS of water but 300gms. Recipe writer had said she was used to using cups and spoon measurements so she had given both.

Cant waste it so I increased the flour, doubled it and a bit more. 1.25 cups by 2 equals 2,50 so had to double plus. Continued on, Double checking the recipe!

Annie takes no more than two minutes to mix, then tip it out and leave to rise for 30 minutes. I did use a BIG bowl, the mix filled it! It was to make a scroll, ended up making three scrolls, one with sultanas and cocoa, rolled and cut, filled one tray. Second one was jam roly poly and last one was cheese and corn.

Thankfully I had lots of little plastic bags and now I have a freezer drawer full on snacks, good to have one with a cuppa. I really do need to READ the recipe more than once!

From rice to flour.

Warren is gluten intolerant and while he can have some ordinary flour, I do try to stay away for too much of it for him. I read in Annie's instruction book that rice can be ground into flour.

I have a big bag of brown rice in the pantry that I don't particularly like, its takes for ages to cook, I know that it is good for us but...... Up shot is, I bought other rice to use and the brown rice sits there. I couldn't throw it out as that would be wasteful so it just sits! I probably bought it early in the year when we had five visitors from China staying here for a few days. They wanted to eat Western food but at least it was there.

I decided to see if I could make that brown rice into flour and then into a pizza and yes it is possible!
The recipe asked for 400 gms of flour which would make four pizzas bases, I don't want four so I halved the recipe. Apparently if grounding grains into flour its best to do no more than 250 gms at a time, that suited me fine.

Ninety seconds was all it took to go from the brown rice on the left to the fine ground flour on the right.

I continued using the recipe and got the pizza made, even though I used yeast it didnt seem to rise very much but it tasted good. I just added a couple of mushrooms, a spring onion and some ham with grated cheese on top. Didn't even taste like gluten free.

Tonight I am making a shepherds pie, I cant remember the last time I made one. Mashed potato is done and sitting in the heat pot. Its a stainless steel bowl with lid that keeps food either hot or cold.

A bonus that I have found already with Annie, is that once its on, such as for the potatoes, it doesn't need to be checked on, no pot boiling over and it doesn't over cook if I get busy doing something else. 

I took the opportunity to put everything away that I had out on the bench and packed the dishwasher then sat down at the computer knowing that it will "ding" when its finished as well as turn off.

Although Warren told me that I should send it back this afternoon as I was in the kitchen juicing by hand some oranges to make a hot orange juice for afternoon tea as obviously it doesn't juice oranges.

 He was joking!