Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Rainy day cooking with Paul Hollywood and Tom Kerridge

My fiance and I love to cook, and with the arrival of a couple of new cookbooks, Tom Kerridge's Best Ever Dishes & Paul Hollywood's Bread, in our home meant a day of cooking last Saturday, especially since the weather wasn't very nice.

I really like fresh bread, the taste and the smell, but making it hasn't always been a success. I once made some bread rolls as a teenager and the result was my father said, they were that hard, he could use them instead of stones to skip across water. Disaster.
So I was hesitant, but wanting to try my hand at making bread again. Armed with my new Bread cookbook I decided to make Malt loaf.


It was very easy to make, but it didn't rise in the proofing stage as much as I thought it should, so I was apprehensive the malt loaf wouldn't work. And I have to learn patience in the proofing stage! I was too tempted to keep checking on the rise of it.
The end result was better than I hoped. This Malt loaf recipe tasted lovely, better than the dense squidgy malt loaf you buy in supermarkets, this was a bread style, much lighter, and very delicious spread with butter. Fiance gave the thumbs up of approval, so that was great. It gave me hope that I can make some other types of bread too. 


While I was making my Malt loaf, my fiance was making a lasagna from Tom Kerridge's new book. Now most of Tom's recipes have a twist, nothing is ever normal, and not always easy. I think my fiance likes the challenge of Tom's recipes, which are usually two pages long, lots of ingredients (some not always readily available) and have the preparation time of not minutes or hours, but days! 
The lasagna was chosen as I fancied it, and Fiance thought it would be one of the 'quicker' recipes...haha....


The 1 1/2 pound of tomatoes was picked from our own tomatoes plants!


Some of the ingredients

Hours later, with the kitchen filled with the delicious smell of home cooking, the end result of my fiance's hard work, was a different kind of lasagna I've ever had, but utterly tasty and satisfying. Tom's recipe was a hit (again). We ate the lasagna the next day as well after a game of golf, and I took some more to work the following day.



Winter is coming, and that means more recipes, lots of cooking with the clever man of the house, and enjoying many delicious meals. It's the only part of winter I like! And I'll keep putting them up on the blog to document it all. 


1 comment:

K.A.T. said...

It all looks lovely!!
You can come be my chef any day!

Best Seller!

  So happy to see The Winter Widow a best seller in Amazon Australia Kindle!