I am cooking and baking today. It is milky with fog outside and so bright, warm and cheerful in the house by my little fire. I am only eating one meal a day, these days, and it is making me feel a lot healthier and more energetic. It also makes me keenly interested in that one meal!
Today, I saw my husband having some beautiful orange-yoked fried eggs for breakfast. If you want a good orange-yolked egg you need to feed greens to your hens. Kale is the best if you have lots.
Along with the eggs, I started craving baked beans. I find beans so comforting and filling and they keep my appetite satiated for a long time because they have so much fiber. I always cook my own baked beans as it is such an absurdly simple recipe and the resulting beans are tons better than anything you can buy. I have been making these beans for over twenty years and get great results each time.
Here is my recipe which is one of my presents to you today. I think I got this recipe from a book of inexpensive recipes for students. I have copied it into three cooking notebooks so far as it is such a favourite recipe it always makes it into my new cookbooks when the old one is destroyed through overuse.
Put two cups of small, dry white beans, four cups of water, 1/3 of a cup of molasses, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 medium onion chopped, one tablespoon of Dijon mustard, 1/2 a teaspoon of sea salt and two ounces of bacon cut into strips into a slow cooker. Stir it up. Cook it on high for about five hours and stir again. Cook another two hours until the beans are very tender.
That is all there is to it. I gave this recipe to one friend who insisted on soaking the beans in water overnight and the beans were insipid and the sauce very runny. The beans are cooked from dry so they soak up all the flavour from the other ingredients.
The way the house smells when these beans are cooking is heavenly. Another thing that I was doing today was to bake bread. I always bake eight loaves at a time. I mix up the bread dough and knead it for about eight minutes. I usually do this one handed as I was taught to just roll the dough around to wake up the gluten.
Some people work far too hard, knead the dough very strongly and add too much flour into the mix. The rule with wheat bread is to add the least amount of flour to get the best bread. I just sprinkle a little bit of flour on the dough when it begins to get sticky.
Here is my recipe for four loaves of white bread. I always double the recipe but for the first few times, stick to the single recipe until you get the hang of it. 5 cups of warm water, 2 tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of yeast, excellent organic white flour which I buy at Donna’s Grocery Store at the Guest House on Denman, 2 tablespoons of sea salt and 4 tablespoons of olive oil or melted butter.
Put the warm water, sugar and yeast into a large bowl. Wait for a few minutes until the yeast foams up. Beat in some flour and the salt and oil. Keep adding flour a little at a time until you get a stiffish batter. Pour it out onto a floured counter or table and dust the surface with flour and begin to knead gently. Keep on kneading and adding flour when the dough gets sticky until you have a firm, elastic dough that pushes back against your hands. Pinch a triangle into the dough with both your hands. When the triangle holds, your dough is done and should be placed in an oiled bowl and covered with a clean tea towel and left in a warm place to rise until it doubles in size.
Once the dough doubles in size, punch it down and cut the dough into four equal pieces. Oil the counter and put the first lump of dough on it. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a long rectangle. Roll the dough up and pinch the ends and the seam closed. Place the dough into a greased metal loaf pan and put it back in the warm place and cover it with a cloth until it is doubles in size. Do this again with the remaining pieces of dough. Bake at 400 degrees for thirty minutes. Take a loaf out of its pan and tap the bottom. The bottom of the bread should be golden and sound hollow when you tap it.
Between the beans and the bread, your house will smell fantastically cozy!
