Firstly I would like to fill everyone in on why it has been so long since my last post. I know I mentioned wanting to do one of Jamie's recipes at least twice a week, meaning I would mainly be doing my cooking on the weekends. These last few weeks have been pretty exhausting to say the least. I worked six days in a row, and decided that I really needed to take the seventh day to rest. We ordered pizza for dinner. Not my favorite thing to do, but it was definitely easier then sweating over the stove.
The following weekend, I realized I really had to get my act together and make up for not cooking before, which is why I decided to GO BIG OR GO HOME and try to bake bread from scratch!I am pretty sure that I have done this before in Culinary school, although for some reason, most of the things I made back then have escaped my mind. I will defiantly remember it this time around. I have to say, that kneading bread dough truly requires some crazy upper body strength, which is something that I don't have much of. After about 30 seconds of mushing and punching and kneading the dough, my arms felt as if they were going to fall off. Luckily, arm strength is something my wife is not lacking in. All those years of being a personal trainer have definitely paid off. Thanks babe!
I have to say, for being a basic bread recipe, it was kind of confusing. Actually, if I'm being completely honest, a lot of Jamie's recipes in this first cookbook tend to confuse me. I feel as if he hadn't quite learned out how to explain a recipe properly just yet. I decided to take a look at the bread chapter in another one of his Naked Chef cookbooks, Happy Days with the Naked Chef. This recipe seemed pretty much the same, except that it excluded the use of honey and semolina flour and that it was actually written out in layman's terms... I didn't have to decipher what he meant. For my bread, I did wind up adding a spoonful of honey, because I thought the sweetness would add a little something extra. And although I did buy that special semolina flour, I didn't end up using it.
Another thing with this bread recipe that I was not too fond of, was that at the point where he is supposed to tell us how long to bake the bread for and on what temperature, instead he tells us to turn the page and find the correct bread recipe we would like to use. The only problem with that is I did not want to make Focaccia bread or honey & banana bread... I just wanted to make a plain basic bread. So because of this, I was forced to decide on my own temperature and timing by comparing the basic bread recipe to the most similar one I could find. Honey & banana it was! 425 degrees for 20-25 minutes. By the end of the 25 minutes, the crust of my bread was starting to become very brown, but by sticking my finger into the center of the roll, I found out that it was still completely raw on the inside. After lowering the temperature to 350 degrees and continuing to cook it for 10 more minutes, ripping it apart, adding butter to the top of it and then cooking it for another 10 minutes, I promptly gave up. Betty Crocker I am not!
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| Basic Bead Fail |
The soup was a lot easier. I left the leek out of this recipe. As I mentioned earlier, I will try any type of food once, but if I learn that its not for me, I stay away from it. Leeks are one of those foods. Jamie's method of making soup differed in mine by the order in which he "threw things into the pot." I usually make sure that my broth is good and cooked before adding in all of the vegetables. In the end, the entire soup tastes like the broth. Jamie's method though was to salute all of the vegetables in the pot first and then add the broth. Thus making the broth taste like the veggies and not the other way around. Its so simple, yet totally brilliant!
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| Minestrone Soup |
One thing I do have to say though about Mr. Oliver, is he seemed to have a slight obsession with rosemary in this first cookbook. Just about every recipe I've done so far asks for it. My wife and I were already not the biggest fans, and after giving it a fair shot I have decided to stop using it as much, Its way too over powering.
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