Humous, houmous...?

"Food" is an odd word isn't it? Food, food, foooooood (say it a few times and you'll see what I mean) an "oo" sandwiched between the woolly consonants "f" and "d".  The word comes from the Old English foda, says the Online Etymology Dictionary (yes, that is what I do in my spare time, do you have a problem with that?) but that in itself comes from an old Germanic verb meaning "to feed": fodjan.  The word has still older roots in Greek and Latin as one might imagine from such a mongrel of a language as English; it is believed to have evolved from the stem of the Greek "pateisthai" and Latin "pastor", commonly understood to mean shepherd, but originally in fact "feeder".   Apparently words beginning in "P" in Latin often ended up as "F" in German, for reasons obscure to me until I get enough time to read deeper.

But why am I telling you this right? Well apart from the fact that words and their evolution is constantly fascinating to me and that I think it's sad that people don't care where their words come from, this post is about food.  Yes, I admit that that doesn't exactly explain the etymology lesson, but if you factor in the fact that my mind has a tendency to wander, it makes perfect sense.

Oddly enough I'm having difficulty thinking what food the word "food" would be if it were food! The idea is slightly too self referential for my sleep deprived head to contemplate, so I will have to save that for later.

But on with the recipe! Hummous(?) is one of my favourite foods, I probably eat it everyday, and what could be better than a delicious food? Why, a delicious food that you made yourself of course. So if, like me, you like hummus (how do you spell the damn thing?!) here's how you can make it.

Ingredients:

• Chickpeas                              240g (drained)
• Tahini (sesame seed paste)     1 tsp
• Olive oil                                  1 tbsp
• Lemon                                    juice of 1/2 to 1
• Garlic                                     1 clove
• Salt                                        to taste
• Pepper                                    to taste
• Paprika                                   sprinkle (optional)

Method:

• Drain the chickpeas and blend to a paste
• Finely chop the garlic 
• Squeeze the lemon
• Mix the chickpea paste, olive oil, tahini and garlic together in a mixing bowl.
• Add the juice from 1/2 the lemon
• Taste your humous so far and add salt and pepper and more lemon juice to your preference (personally I would add a few generous pinches of salt and the rest of the lemon juice or it tastes a little bland)
• Add around 100ml of water for a slightly thinner consistency (unless you really like it thick of course)

• Scrape into a bowl with a lid and sprinkle over a pinch of paprika for appearance and adorn with a sprig of basil, parsley or dill (lots of herbs go with humous)

It looks and tastes great and it is so quick!

I couldn't find any of the aforementioned herbs, so that is kale on the top, but you get the idea!

Autumn

I think autumn is my favourite time of year, along with spring - everything is in-between one thing and another, the leaves are turning, making everywhere golden and pink.  Taking photos in autumn is great because the colours are so vibrant and warm and the sun is often quite low so that it shines through everything.

I have nothing much more to say, I just wanted to share some photos!

Yay! you looked through all the photos! (or just scrolled down to the comments, but yay anyway)

Another great thing about autumn and all these lovely leaves is another excuse to get our my flower press and press some, um, leaves - hmm, from now on I'm just calling it The Press - I think it deserves the capitals. ;)

Grape Daze

What felt like a brief, blitheringly hot end to summer was apparently enough to produce a huge amount of grapes, and I mean an huge amount, on a small vine in my grandparent's garden.  They weren't entirely ripe however, and we spent a couple of days agonising about whether to pick them or not, but when it started raining we decided to give in and pick the lot before they went to the bad...

bucket full'a grapes

But what to do with such a large quantity of on average slightly under ripe grapes I hear you cry, and the answer is of course, to squash them!  We're making wine.

So, let the squishing begin!
But first the tedious sorting through of the grapes. yay. So we spent what felt like several hours removing the "unsound" grapes from the rest (unsound being the word they use in the wine making book we used)

And with the tedious sorting came what I am going to refer to as The Grape Daze - capital T, G and D.  After a while sorting through these grapes my mind was starting to, shall be say, search around for distraction in just about any form

1) bug containment

Strictly speaking this wasn't my mind wandering, it was just me being generally unwilling to see silly little insects turned into wine, so we a big bucket for unsound grapes and into this bucket also went several earwigs, a multitude of spiders, slugs and about a million snails.  And these snails are little tiny baby snails so it is quite easy to, in ones valiant attempts to rescue said stupidly small snails, squash them instead.  Which is why we lost several good grapes to the cause - it turns out it's easier just to pick of the grape that the snail is on. Something worth remembering I think.

2) a fixation over the word "inverted"

Now don't ask me how this got started, but after a while I couldn't get the word out of my head. Inverted, inverted, in-vert-ed. INVERTED. I started wondering whether you could vert something.  I feel an example is necessary...

Imagine, you are walking along (stick with me here) you see a beetle (or a tortoise if you prefer).  The beetle (or tortoise) is on the ground in front of you, on it's back - it's little legs are flailing and it looks as mournful as a maggot just lying there on it's back.  So being a generally nice person that doesn't like to see others suffering for no reason you vert it. Putting it back the right way up, it waddles away happily to it's beetle (or tortoise) family.  Hooray verting saves the day.

ehem, or something like that - unfortunately I looked it up, and vert is not a verb - but it should be, just like the singular of sheep should in fact be shoop.

I think this whole thing may have been a by-product of the bug rescuing.

 



3) Graphs

I started to mentally makes graphs of what we were doing and how long it took to do it. No joke.  I think this is some kind of sign that I've been doing to much statistics.  Or maybe it's just my mind being strange at a time of intense tedium.  I don't know.

I've drawn out some of them for some reason - here you go, mock me if you dare! ;)










4) The pomegranate seed

This was perhaps the most bizarre of all, and it occurred towards the end of the squashing process itself. I had, earlier on in the day been eating a pomegranate, (fascinating right?) and my dad found a seed on the worktop, so he squeezed it into out increasingly full vat of grape juice.   Not too strange so far, but then came this strange little scene, where in the future we're world famous wine makers and people are begging us for the secret, and it's that in every bottle there is the juice of one single pomegranate seed.  It was a bit of a Black Books everyone-said-I-was-mad-moment.  (I can't find a clip on youtube so if you don't know what I'm talking about you're going to have to watch Black Books, Grapes of Wrath episode or forever be tormented with not understanding my little story)

Any way, the product of this strange afternoon were four rather disconcertingly brown coloured gallon bottles of grape juice. I am assured the brown will settle, otherwise we have jsut made pure liquid brown (as opposed to pure green) and this is going to be the most unappetisingly coloured wine ever made.

Bread

Hello, gosh it's been a month - urm, been a bit busy - well, it's half term now and nice to have a bit of time to do things that aren't work, like reading or stamp making or baking...

Having given up on the so-called variety of bread available at extortionate prices from the supermarket, we have resorted to making our own – minus bread maker I might add.  After baking this, my third loaf in as many days (one thing about home baked loaves is that we seem to eat them a lot faster than shop bought ones!) I have decided to share our perfected recipe.

Ingredients: 

• 500g bread flour (I used strong wholemeal)
• 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast
• 1½ tsp finely ground salt (if you're using larger, flakier salt, you'll need around 2 tsp)
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1½ tbsp olive oil (plus around another tbsp for kneading)
• Around 300ml hand-hot water
• Anything you want in your bread; olives, sun dried tomato, herbs etc.  Be generous when adding these as it can look like a lot when you add it to the dough, but then come out pretty sparse.

Method:

1.  Add together the flour, salt and yeast together and mix in a large bowl
2. Stir in around half the water and mix well with a large spoon, or your hands if you don’t mind getting them sticky, add in the olive oil and honey and continue to mix (this is where I add in my extra ingredients as it only gets harder to mix in, the longer you wait).  Add the rest of the water a little at a time until all the flour at the bottom of the bowl has been mixed in.  If you are adding something wet like tomato to the mix, you probably won’t need the whole 300ml of water
3. Once all the mixture is coming together, oil a surface with about half a tbsp of olive oil and empty the dough onto it to knead - if you use oil here instead of flour you don’t dry the dough out so much during kneading.
4. Everyone seems to knead differently, but you essentially just need to be stretching out the dough and folding it back up again to build up the gluten in the flour.  Knead for around 5 to 10 minutes until the dough can be stretched a fair bit without breaking.
5. If you’re making a loaf, flatten the dough into a rectangle(ish) and fold the edges into the middle, then place it seam down into a well greased loaf tin.  If you’re going for a free form loaf, shape the dough into a ball and place on a well greased baking tray.  Don’t be tempted to flatten it into a nice loafy shape – it will expand and do that itself.  I use olive oil for a baking tray, but butter for a tin because it sticks to the sides better.
6. Leave the dough covered by a damp cloth to prove – depending upon how impatient you are, you can leave it in a warm place for 30-40 minutes or at room temperature for about an hour.  Dough with added stuff may take longer to prove, but you’re waiting until it has about doubled in size, and a reliable test seems to be that it’s done if you give it a prod and it holds the impression.  Sprinkle a handful of flour over the top of the loaf and cut a slash in the top with a sharp knife
7. Whilst the dough is proving, preheat the oven to 190°C or gas mark 6 EDIT: repeating this recipe, I think it's best not to pre-heat the oven because starting on a low heat means the bread seems to bake through better.  Bake for 30-35 minutes at gas mark 6 or 190°C.  
8. Once it’s out of the oven, place on a cooling tray and upturn your tin/take the loaf off the baking tray.  If you tap the bottom, it should make a nice hollow sound.  Also, if you’re bottom and side crust isn’t crusty enough for you, put the loaf back in the oven upside down for a few minutes under a watchful eye until it crisps up a bit.

This is an olive and sun dried tomato loaf

and this was (note the past tense) a plain but equally delicious one

 
Personally, I like a good crust on my bread, and I absolutely hate really soggy bread that you can practically squish back into a ball of dough, so this recipe makes a loaf that has a thickish crust to them and although not stodgy, are nice and firm.

We bought a 1.5kg bag of flour that cost about £1.40 and that can make three 800/900g loaves with this recipe.  That comes to just under 50p per loaf, plus you can add in whatever you want to suit your taste.  Minus time for proving and baking, when you can get on and do other things, this only takes about half an hour, so all in all, I’m pretty pleased with our transition from shop bought to homemade bread.  :)

The Long Earth - review

So, it's been a while since my last post, which is strange really, because I have a list of things which I keep meaning to post about.   Anyway, my recent posts have been wild-lifey, craftsy (sort of) - and yes, I know both of those description are not strictly speaking proper words but forget that for a minute because this is... (drum-roll please) a BOOK REVIEW, yaaaay - it's been a while, and it's kind of why I started this blog and as I recently mentioned, I have yet to write a review of a Terry Pratchett book.  So I'm going to stop blathering on and get on with it because I realise now just how mad I'm starting to sound ;)

I read this book in a perfectly sensible length of time (just so you know that I am capable of it!) and I really enjoyed it.  The Long Earth is written by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett both of whom are amazing science fiction and fantasy writers. Terry Pratchett is the author of (among other things) the Discworld series which I absolutely love.  I probably know more about that world and those characters than is rationally acceptable but I love those books too much to stop re-reading them (all right, re-re-re-reading them).

I actually started out, trying to write something about the Discworld series, but it's proving to be surprisingly difficult - I want to convey the reasons for my addiction to these books without coming across as totally obsessed and crazy - hope it's not too late for that ;)

The The Long Earth is based around the idea "what if anyone could freely and easily travel, step, between uninhabited parallel worlds" and the narrative follows the effects this has on individuals and society - from families who want to settle thousands of earths away to start a new life but have a child who is unable to step, to how religious groups and governments around the world react.  From "step-day" things begin to change dramatically, with people travelling 'east' and 'west' in search of a new start, a chance to explore, freedom, new opportunities in short.  But with these come new opportunities for people to commit crime, to become prejudiced or to die horribly in unexpected situations just a thoughts distance away from home.  The authors have started with this idea and followed it through to all the possibilities, good and bad.  All of this is told in an entertaining way through the perspectives of different people but mainly Joshua, a natural stepper who discovered his ability when the stepping device was invented.

I found that together, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter created wonderfully believable characters - they all felt real and solid, and I think this comes from a really good understanding of people.  No person is 'good' or 'bad' but instead a subtle combination of traits that come together through the plot to make a well rounded character.  Even Lobsang, created as an artificial intelligence, who has proved that he is in fact the reincarnation of a human comes across remarkably so - I personally stopped thinking of him as a computer quite early on and without really realising it.

I quite like books that don't stick solidly to one storyline but zip about a bit - it makes it feel just that bit more real to me, less like I'm looking through a tiny little window at one story, and more like I'm getting to see a wider picture.   I thought that was done well in this book - it didn't get annoying as it so often can, and I loved it when peices of other stories slotted into place in the 'main' one.  It's almost, but not exactly, like dramatic irony, when you know the back story of a character but another character doesn't.  If you don't really like the jump around different stories, the beginning of the book is quite heavy on that, but it does resolve into a main storyline after a while and things begin to drop into place - don't let it put you off.

Another great thing about this book was the rationalisation; in sci-fi, I think it's really easy for a book to get bogged down with a whole load of crazy and irrational things that don't quite make sense.  But in this book, I felt like the authors started with this one 'what if' idea, and then just followed the story and the questions, just like the characters.  I thought this meant the book progressed really nicely and didn't end up with huge incomprehensible holes in the logic that always frustrate me in science fiction *ehemi'mtalkingtoyoustevenmoffatehem*

I have to say, I didn't dislike much about this book, but I did find the ending a little... odd shall we say - it felt inconclusive and dare I say it, a little rushed.  I don't know, a lot of the time when I think that, it's because of the way I read it, so perhaps if I read it again it wouldn't feel like that.  Without wanting to give anything away, it's a little hard to say in any more detail what it was that bothered me.  This is no bad thing as far as I'm concerned, becuase I'm not sure I can put my finger on it.  I think a re-read is definitely in order.  There is a sequel, worryingly titled The Long War, which I will read soon - that is, if I ever get any time to do ANYTHING APART FROM WORK! It may be that this continuation completely dispels my uncertainty about the end of this book, but until then, I can say no more.

I would definitely recommend this book to science fiction lovers, and for people who don't read much science fiction, it's a great book to get your teeth into, with great characters.  Esentially what I'm saying is, whatever your usual genre (if you have one) this is a great book to read!

Chalk board

We've painted a chalk board on our wall to write stuff on (stating the obvious, I know) and I'm telling you this because I've just written up a quote from an amazing book by an amazing author - I'm sure anyone who knows me will know who I'm talking about, but here it is:

It's from Sourcery by Terry Pratchett - one of my absolute favourite authors.  His books are insightful, witty and entertaining.  I've probably read all of them far too many times!  If you haven't read any of his books or the Discworld series in particular, I definitely recommend them.  Now I realise that I haven't reviewed any of his books, I definitely have to.  So, a specific book review coming sooooon :)

Mushy Roooms!

 Mushroomming!!!!!!! YAY!! OK, slightly over enthusiastic - I never really feel like going looking for mushrooms but once I've started I do really like it.  I think this is mainly because I don't actually like mushrooms, but once I get over that, I just enjoy looking for them - my family can then do the actual eating ;)

We've been collecting mushrooms for ages now, but I still can't remember which ones are good to eat - I'm good at spotting them but I always end up collecting the poisonous ones, like the appropriately named Death cap, and having to be told "um, no Ana, those aren't good - just put them down over there" - the problem is, they do look so much like good ones.  Anyway, this is why you should go mushrooming with someone who actually knows - in this case, my Dad (who then is the one that actually eats them).

Russula

Charcoal burner (type of russula)

Shaggy parasol (great name!)

Lurid bolete (scaaaaaary name!)

Lurid bolete - according to wikipedia, "Caution is advised if choosing this species for consumption, as it resembles other less edible blue-staining boletes. Some guidebooks recommend avoiding it altogether." but, my Dad does eat them - anyway, don't take my word for it - I WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE ;)

There were also a few little milk caps.

The lurid boletes turn blue when you cut into them within a few seconds - which I love, and I'm not really surprised people are cautious about eating, because they do look totally dodgy!