Daily Bread

I've had this book on my Amazon wishlist for a while now after seeing it mentioned on Kat's Blog but not having set eyes on it in the flesh I didn't know how useful it would be as we can always make bread in our bread maker. Kat came up trumps again this morning though with links to this blog which is not only beautiful but has a recipe from the book. So the obvious course of action for the day was to make a batch of no knead bread.

The toddler didn't understand the no knead part and spent a lot of time getting messy and having fun with the sludgy dough - I don't know if the dough should be this wet or if I didn't get the conversions quite right, I'll try it again next week and take a bit more time working out the proper recipe instead of just winging it.

The bowl is from Cley and was a present to Matthew from my mum one Christmas when he was going through a bread making phase. You really do need a very big bowl for this bread so it was perfect.

It's been cold again here so it took a good few hours to prove so this isn't a lunchtime bread on the first day you make it but there's plenty of dough to keep some in the fridge and use one subsequent days.

Whilst it was on its second proving we did a bit of prep for dinner and some reading at the same time.

The boy helped with the chopping of the herbs.

And then the bread was ready. I wasn't convinced that a grapefruit sized piece would be enough for us for one meal but it would have been okay. As I made two loaves though we had a bit extra and the rest will make fantastic bruschetta tomorrow. I'd say the texture is more like ciabatta than french bread but that may be because it was so wet - she's not kidding when she says you'll need floured hands to shape the dough. Actually the dough wasn't shaped as it was so wet I just sort of plonked it on the board and hoped. The one on the right wasn't keen to get off the board into the oven and so has cous cous on the top as I'd put a mix of cous cous and flour on the board to stop them sticking.

So there you go - fresh bread, green beans, tomato and herbs, fried halloumi and raw carrots. A yummy dinner even if I do say so myself.