Tuesday 17 May 2016

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again...

The super-discerning among you will have spotted from the title that I'm a huge Fred Astaire fan. It has particularly come to mind lately, as I never think of myself as having good levels of perseverance. Oh dear. So where does that leave me when trying to teach, and model, a bit of resilience? A bit of willingness to keep trying when the early results are not great? 

I can talk the talk, as Cupcake recently demonstrated to me. I was making a really impressive botch of something on my sewing machine, and was about to blow. Cupcake slunk up beside me and stroked my arm. I told her I was in a bit of a bad mood because I'd made a mistake. She just laughed and said "That's OK Mummy, everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to try again." I stared for a minute, listening to my words in her mouth, and my grumpiness seemed utterly ridiculous. "You're right," I said, picking her up. "Let's have a cuddle and I'll try again in a minute."

This newly opened mind has been deeply tested over the past few weeks and months. Unfortunately Cupcake has not been at all well, and there have been lots of doctors and hospitals and tests. We have a diagnosis now, and one of the aspects of the treatment plan is that she needs to be on an extra-low salt diet, pretty much for always. I don't know if you have ever looked but salt is everywhere. We already never had processed meals or takeaways, never had bakery stuff like sausage rolls. Where else to look to cut out more? Flipping everywhere. Newly out of reach foods include: cheddar (and almost all other cheese, soft or hard); sausages (Cupcake is almost in mourning); bread... Eep. Life without sandwiches. Or wraps, or pittas, or crumpets.

Time to dust off the cookery books and get experimenting. We already made bread occasionally, more for the fun of the process than the outcome. Was salt essential to bread? I was about to find out.

Version 1: Giant Fail

This is the Cottage Loaf from the Lakeland Bread Book. If you ever need a prop for a production of the Jack and Beanstalk, this would be excellent for the giant's table. You'll need strong jaws to eat it through. 


No matter what I adjusted (rise time, cooking time) I ended up with giant bland loaves that were OK-ish on day 1, but by day 2 were distinctly claggy to chew. Our bread consumption went right down - a fairly clear indicator that even toasted, this was not going to be our long-term loaf.

Version 2: Milked Dry

This is the Milk Loaf from the BBC food recipes online. I thought I'd try a loaf made with milk instead of water. The lack of salt had so far made for a fairly flavourless offering - I was optimistic that maybe milk would help. Hmmm. 

Well, it was less sticky to chew, and it had a bit more flavour, but neither of us was rushing for another slice. And this was fresh-baked bread, the house filled with yummy yeasty warm smells. We should have been ripping into it with glee. But we weren't.

Version 3: Fast and Fabulous

In the library, I came upon this book: Five Minute Bread. I was fairly depressed by this stage, at the lack of return for quite a lot of effort and time, in mixing, kneading and waiting for rises. I borrowed the book, full of scepticism. It reckoned you needed a couple of bits of kit - a bread stone to bake on, and a peel/paddle for transferring dough to stone, as it's very wet and floppy before baking. I had neither. I put the dough on a sheet of baking parchment, and slid that onto a hot thick baking tray to cook it.

Look at this beauty! It tastes, if anything, better than it looks. We race through the loaves. And here's the really good bit - you mix it all up (genuinely in the promised 5 minutes, including weighing) and you bake a bit as you need, keeping the rest of the mix In The Fridge All Week. So instead of a new loaf needing to either be a) de-frosted from last week's baking, or b) mixed, kneaded, risen and baked from scratch, ready about 4 hours after you were hungry, with this you just grab another bit from the fridge and about an hour later it's cooked and fabulous and fresh. Have I mentioned there is No Kneading? No? Well there isn't. Seriously, this is possibly witchcraft.

So, perseverance paid off. I feel proud of the loaf, but more proud of Cupcake and myself - we hung in there, we didn't complain when we ate some really bad bread (I never knew that could exist), and we made something good. You can insert your own metaphors wherever you like in this post.