Kitchen diary, 28/06/13

The thing about big sacks of lumpwood charcoal, which I infinitely prefer over briquettes, is that all the small pieces that I want to fill the chimney and start the blaze inevitably - because of science! - fall to the bottom. There may be a fix for this that does not involve groping up to the elbow in carbonised wood, but if there is I do not know it.

Filthy was I, ere I saw fire.

But I have a big hunk of pork, which will shortly be smoking over slow mesquite. I may well repeat the Moroccan potatoes to go with, because they were good; and I want to make a salsa of hotness, just because.

There may also be bread; it's in the oven, but more in the interests of science than appetite. I was wrong before, overconfident in that way I can be before I am blasted back into a proper sense of inferiority: my sourdough can be left too long, worked too often, kept too warm. Something. I shoulda baked it when we got in last night, or else fridged it till this morning. I don't like chill doughs, though; it's such a poor conductor, they take forever to come back up to a working temperature.

However: when I came to give it one last knead this morning before I shaped it for its final rise, it collapsed on me altogether. Went from the firm coherent dough it had been last night to a sticky mess with no structure and no resilience. I floured the cloth and set it to rise in a basket anyway, and I am baking it anyway, and we shall see what we shall see - but it may be beyond hope. I'll let you know.

EtA: as I foretold thee, really. It hath no sense of structure. Oven spread, rather than oven spring; it didn't so much rise as broaden. It's not heavy and it doesn't taste awful, but that's ... not really enough, y'know? I hope we all learned something today; I know I did.

EtA2: M'wife has called me a loafist. That may be a first.

When m'wife tells me I'm hot, I feel obliged to listen

The concrete on the patio was almost too hot to walk across barefoot this afternoon; certainly too hot to linger on. I felt like one of those desert lizards, lifting alternate feet. It's going to be in the 90s here till the middle of next week, apparently; 110 further inland, east of the Bay. That forecast comes with official Awful Warnings.

Fortunately the grill stands in the shade of the clubhouse, so it's workable out there.

The pork is gruntling along. I've put some habaneros, garlic and salt to smoke beside it, with intentions of making a little habanero/garlic salsa as well as a more moderate mango salsa to share with m'wife.

In news not of food, I finished a story today and have sent it off to where it was requested. She may not be expecting quite that - "epic fantasy" was the brief, so I wrote about an old man and his garden - but, y'know. We like variety.

It's a short story, though, and it's taken me most of the month. Some of my friends have pretty much written a novel in that time. Time was, I could've competed with them. Not apparently now. I hate this unproductiveness, but I can't find where I'm slacking. Granted there are other things I am doing, but shopping for and feeding two people is really not a full-time job, even if you reckon in all the angst. I wish I could monetise my angst. It is a fine flourishing peacock fellow, it really ought to be displayed. And paid for...

Kitchen diary: a lamentation

A terrible thing seems to have happened. It's not just that I cannot find my copy of Dan Leppard's The Handmade Loaf - it is that it doesn't appear in my catalogue of cookbooks over on Eat Your Books. Which would strongly suggest that it was lost somewhere mid-Atlantic or later, as I'm damn sure it will have been packed. It is one of my criteria: the sourdough recipe I've been using for what, five years or so, came from that book. As did the base from which I developed my sourdough ciabatta recipe - which is of course why I was looking for it now, mutter mutter...

In other news, my habanero/garlic/limejuice salsa is not for the faint of heart, I am just sayin'. Six smoked & roasted habaneri, three garlic cloves ditto ditto, the juice of a lime and a glug of olive oil. Whizzy-whizz.

I was a nice boy, I took the seeds & pith out of the serrano chilli that went into the mango salsa*


*The true heat, we read, is in the pith - the white membrane that holds the seeds - and not the seeds themselves. I don't know whether "take the seeds out" is a shorthand because you automatically remove the pith at the same time, or if it's disseminated** ignorance or what, but there it is.

**Heh, d'you see what I did there?