Breadwinning

Working full time often brings the full time work blues with it. I find this manifests in several different ways. An unhealthy attachment to the stationary catalogue. Borderline abusive relationships with excel spreadsheets. And occasionally hypothesising a new pokemon based on office supplies.

I've found several ways to combat the crazy. The first is pretending I work on a film set and dressing appropriately. Today I am a secretary in the 50's. Tomorrow, I will be a secretary in the 80's. Next week? I will be an administrative assistant from the future.

The other - making everyone hella jealous of your packed lunch. You know what works every time? Toasting your homemade bread in the staff kitchen. Nothing smells better.

Remember when I told you to go out and make bread? If you didn't you should really try this recipe. A method to save you from the mid-week malaise is at hand. Slightly adapted from this marvelous recipe.

For this recipe you

Do not need to knead anything

Do not need a bread maker

Do need to be able to leave this sucker overnight. It takes about two minutes to mix, 12 - 18 hours to rise, two minutes to mix again, and another hour or so to rise for a second time. Planning is sometimes required!

What you will need

• 3 cups baker's flour.

Baker's flour is not ordinary plain flour, and it is not breadmaker mix. It will be marked as "baker's" or "strong" or for bread and pizza dough. There should be some at your local supermarket or health food store. Don't get anything with yeast already added!

• 1 cup wholemeal flour

• 1/8 tsp instant yeast

Not interchangeable with "active" yeast. Instant yeast you can add to the dry mix, active you have to add to water and let froth. We're going for super easy instant here.

• 2 cups lukewarm water

• 2 tbsp white or caster sugar

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 1/2 tbs vegetable oil, or 3 tbs melted butter, plus a bit extra.

What you will need to do:

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. The dough is going to double in size, so make sure it's large enough.

If you're me, you probably think 1/8 of a tsp of yeast isn't enough and add a bit more just to make sure things happen. Control yourselves! 1/8 is plenty, I promise.

Add the oil or melted butter to the lukewarm water, just to make things a bit easier, and then mix the wet ingredients with the dry. There's no art here, just whack them all together, make sure all the dry stuff gets wet.

Drizzle a bit of oil or butter over the top of the mix, spread to cover. This is to make sure the surface doesn't dry out while the dough is rising.

Cover with clingwrap and leave for 12 - 18 hours. Make sure you don't leave it somewhere too cold or too hot. I leave it in the laundry in summer and the kitchen in winter.

12 - 18 hours later it should have risen. Deflate by stirring well with a wooden spoon.

Grease a loaf tin, and turn the dough out into it. Make sure it's relatively evenly distributed, not just sitting in a lump in the middle. This will take some scientific pushing and prodding.

Dust the top with a bit of flour. Leave in a warmish place to rise again.

When the dough has risen to about 1/4 inch above the loaf tin (probably a minimum 40 minutes, and definitely a maximum 2 hours before it starts to look like the blob), preheat your oven to 200 degrees celsius.

Put the tin in carefully - we don't want it to deflate this time.

Bake for about 35 - 50 minutes, or until it is browned and crisp on the outside. People say you can tell bread is done if you knock on it and it sounds hollow. This has never, ever worked for me. It should definitely be crisp enough for you to knock on it though, and then feel free to disregard whatever noise it makes.

This is the really hard part: let it cool. Don't cut into this baby for at least 3 or 4 hours.

And then? Then you get to go to town. Or work! And make that hole-punching pokemon jealous. It's especially good toasted with soup or stew. Or pasta sauce, or curry. Or pretty much anything! Enjoy while listening to the following workaday ditties:

Frankly Mr Shankly - The Smiths

Expectations - Belle and Sebastian

Middle of the Road Class War - G.A. Richards and the Dark Satanic Mills Bros.

"Eggs" by Stephen Fry

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One of my favourite food discoveries of recent years came via Stephen Fry in the pretty good film of the very good book, V for Vendetta. In this particular scene, Evey is staying with TV show host Stephen Fry (I’m sure his ‘character’ has a name, but let’s stop pretending he’s not just playing Stephen Fry!) and he makes her breakfast: eggs fried in a hole in a slice of bread.

You’ve probably – unlike me – heard of it before. It’s pretty genius, after all, and comes with a slew of cool names. Toad in the hole. Eggy in a basket. One Eyed Jack. Hobo Toast. Not sure how that last one came about…

Needless, to say, upon tasting the Hobo Toast, Evey flips out. “V made me breakfast just like this!” She points out, a fact I am conveniently ignoring to write this blog. “Maybe I am V?” Stephen retorts. Well, you certainly have the same talent for breakfast. I tell ya, put me in a totalitarian world, and I am totally shacking up with the one man who can source butter and eggs. And homoerotic art.

There are a million ways to make it, but this is how I do it. I would recommend using that bread you made, remember? Honestly, unbelievably delicious. If not, any other thick sliced bread.


Melt 1 tbsp butter in a frying pan until it begins to bubble.

Cut or tear a hole in a thick slice of bread. The hole will probably be around 3ish cms in diameter, but to be honest: it doesn’t really matter.

Coat the bread in the melted butter, and fry on one side until crispy.

Flip the bread over, and break an egg into the hole. Fry until the egg is a bit more than half done. You should be able to see the egg cooking from the bottom up.

Flip again, cook until you think the egg is done to your liking. This is usually ascertained the scientific way, by poking.

Add salt, pepper, and then pick it up with your hands and eat it. And watch Stephen Fry in a sketch from A Little Bit of Fry and Laurie telling you how to be gorgeous:


Thanks, Stephen Fry! You can also see him on QI, series F, screening on ABC every Tuesday night at 9:30. Catch up on missed episodes here.

Homemade and handmade

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My week started with a cooking adventure. I made bread for the first time. It didn’t go too well. But the second time around it worked a charm. So here are some things I've learned about baking bread:

• There are different types of yeast. Read about them here.
  
• You’ll probably use instant or active. The main difference is that instant can be mixed in with the flour, while active should be mixed with water.
  
• Instant yeast will last 12 months (after opening) in your freezer.
  
• The bread continues to cook while it’s cooling, so be good and don’t cut it for a couple of hours at least. Some people suggest a day or more. But they’re clearly crazy.
  
• You should probably make this recipe: No kneading required! But pay attention to temperatures.
  
• Fresh bread is the best with ripe avocado, a generous squeeze of lemon, salt and pepper.

Om nom nom.

Apart from making bread, I’ve been blogging about sea creatures over at I Know My Goat. It's not exactly food or music, but there are otters holding hands. I've been recovering from the surreal and wonderful This is Not Art festival, at which I managed to eat a lot of free food, and scored a delicious recipe for rhubarb and strawberry coulis.



And finally, I've been listening to Voss' debut long player, The Inland Sea, which I'm pretty sure you should be listening to also. Especially if you like well crafted songs about myths and maps and legends, sweet and ambling violin, vocal duets, and the sound of rain.

The Inland Sea is concerned with Ludwig Leichardt's quest to cross the continent, which was, in turn, inspiration for Patrick White's novel Voss. This mess of artistic tribute somehow suits the album, which takes fiction as inspiration perhaps more than fact.

It isn't hard to see much Australian fiction as an attempt to rewrite history - to reinterpret convict suffering not as judicial punishment, but as spiritual trial: at the end of which we receive the promised land, having earned it. This artistic endeavor sees us make heroes of criminals and prophets of madmen. It's an uneasy inheritance, but Voss seems to embrace it. Ludwig Leichardt didn't die: he disappeared into myth. No death mask marked his passing, but perhaps we have been making them ever since.

Recurring themes of domesticity and tribulation, great flights and love, find their way into the lyrics. It's a bit rough around the edges, and hesitant in parts – but it's also surprising and a little bit sublime. A little bit like an inland sea.

Buy it online here. It comes with a gorgeous poster by Alice Carroll (last seen here making jam) and the lyric booklet is tied with string.

Listen to:
Charley's Forest Hall
Leichardt Mask

Check out:
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