Culimary Experiences Again

After a pleasurable experience baking bread last Saturday, I decided to try something similar again today. After all, at the very least I could use back the same recipe, which requires no kneading (yeah!) and is by far the most successful recipe for me, though it does use quite a lot of yeast.

Soft crust and soft inside with rather even holes, a pleasant surprise for me, who had baked so many disastrous breads before.

 I was reading a recipe book on using the oven for Asian cuisines and saw the recipe for making naan bread. Actually, I was looking among my soup recipes for some soup that would make use of leek (pureed into soup is about the only way I will ever eat this vegetable) and potato, apart from leek and potato soup, when I came across this Chicken and Almond soup that apparently goes well with naan bread. And it has leek in it, though no potatoes. The naan bread recipe looks easy enough too. So I thought, why not?

Unfortunately, this naan recipe requires kneading. Since it was not very specific on the kneading process (knead for about 10 minutes until the dough becomes smooth and elastic), and since I changed the recipe a little to include about 40% wholemeal flour (the recipe calls for 100% bread flour and I challenge you to find wholemeal bread flour at the supermarkets near you), I decided not to be stringent on the kneading.  So, after Heidi went to sleep and Jianming took Ethan to his Sunday class and Jethro with him (turned out they would later go to the plaza to order a birthday cake for tomorrow), I quickly started measuring out and mixing the ingredients together. That was simple. Then the kneading. The author of the book had suggested kneading in the mixing bowl itself to reduce the mess. However, after a few strokes of doing just that, I found it awkward and tiring using only one hand. Perhaps the author had a really big and heavy bowl. For me, I still prefer kneading on the counter top. Even then, I had kneaded for 5 minutes and it already seemed like forever. 7 minutes, sweat started flowing down my forehead and the hem of my shorts actually felt damp. The dough did not seem to improve much. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge from past experiences that the dough would yield. I had once kneaded for more that 20 minutes to get the 'windowpane' effect (in bread making terminology, when you take a small piece of the dough and stretch it very thin, till it becomes translucent and you can see light through it, if the dough does not tear at this point, you are done.). My arms ached for a few days afterwards. Well, this time I was only making a flat bread, and if it's not good, I suppose it would at least be crispy. Hence, I decided to knead for 15 minutes and stop. No windowpane, it would fail miserably.

15 minutes later, even though the dough was still a little sticky, I considered it's 'smooth and elastic' enough and left it to rise. The book says to rise till it's about 3 times its size. From my experience last Saturday, where the dough took half the time recommended by the recipe to rise, I had counted on a fast rise time this time. Alas, this time the yeast used was also much less, hence the rising was really agonizingly slow. Point to note: Never put the dough in a transparent dish again: you would only keep looking at it and wondering why it hadn't risen yet.

Nothing much to say for the rest, except that both Heidi and Jethro were awake and active by the time I started on the next stage and I became quite agitated with managing the sticky dough and the sticky hands. All those grand schemes of baking with kids - oh down the drain! Maybe when Heidi is older. Poor Jethro will have to wait because I can't possibly involve him and expect Heidi to be silent about that.

In the end, the naan bread turned out quite good as well! I wonder if it's anything to do with the new oven. The soup was also quite nice. I omitted the salt for convenience as I was also feeding Heidi with the same thing. It tasted a little like curry without the spiciness. Maybe it was the coriander. Maybe Thai green curry is green because of the coriander? I have never looked at the recipe for that because making curries is just not in the pipeline for now. The roast chicken was too salty but I would still say it was roasted just right - juicy and fragrant. Heidi had a pan-cooked chicken slice.

Heidi, standing at her self-appointed place by the food, wanted to be in the picture.

When I finally sat down to dinner with Heidi and Jethro (the older 2 guys being in church still), I wanted to cry as I first bit into the naan bread. I was so touched by the flour and the yeast and the milk etc. and the oven all working for me to produce such a wonderful, amazing food! And there's no one I could talk to about my feelings at the table. That's not to say the other 2 dining companions were not appreciative. Jethro said "Thank you. Thank you ah" a few times to me, and he ate very properly, not moving around much, consuming everything on the plate and the soup, including the salad. Consider his usual dinner behaviour and I should be gratified. Heidi is at her usual with bread. She couldn't gulp them down fast enough. At least my naan bread is a bread in the end! After my emotional reaction was over, the only thing I regretted was not serving them the salad first as the book about French parenting so wisely suggested. I realised that when I saw the two of them gorging on the bread. However, I need not have worried, they seemed to like the quickly-snapped together Japanese cucumber-tomatoes-extra virgin olive oil-lime-feta-avocado salad well enough to finish them without much prompting from me. (I had run out of lemon, hence the lime).

Will I try again? Seriously, usually by Saturday, I would be so worn out with cooking and the mere thought of cooking that I had no wish to whip up anything fanciful. Today's lunch was just porridge with cai xin and Toman fish thrown in and wok-heated egg tofu to give it some flavour. The dinner was not that fanciful really considering that my starting point was just to make a pureed soup so I could use the new hand-held blender we bought last Monday. Then I thought why not make my own bread since it was quite hassle-free and successful the other time? One thing led to another and of course a simple salad for the sake of vegetables is a must and we should have some meat...

On the topic of food, I was reminded of a newspaper article I read recently: a family of 7 (with one more coming in October) surviving on a take-home pay of $1800 per month. The breakdown of their monthly expenses showed that their grocery cost them $400. $400?! How did they manage that? I could not do that with my family of five, though I had hoped I could. But the reality of costs in supermarkets nowadays makes that an illusion. And I don't think wet markets sell things any cheaper. I know of course I still indulge in some luxury items despite the near 50% reduction in income. Yet I know not how I can compromise on these 'luxuries' - brown rice, wholemeal flour, wholemeal bread, the two most expensive brands of non-organic fresh milk, cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese (and occasionally more exotic kinds of cheese when on offer), organic apples. I mix brown rice and white rice when I cook rice or porridge; I mix wholemeal flour with plain or bread flour when I bake; I can't bring myself to buy the cheaper white bread loaf though I would get bread from confectionery shops for their tea and it's hard to find wholemeal bread there really; I would have preferred to buy organic celery, organic spinach and organic strawberries as well since I read that these foods are more susceptible to pesticides, like apples are. But I could not find these in the supermarkets I frequent so my solution is to buy less of them. I do buy non-organic apples for myself and Jianming, when I can't get organic ones. I don't think I am extreme really, just trying to find a balance between going totally organic (which is very expensive and hard to achieve) and swallowing too much pesticides. I don't impose the same standards on my parents or parents-in-law when we have meals there. Just that, if Jianming's income were to ever reduce to $1800, and I couldn't go back to work while getting the kids into good child care centres, I might really collapse. So here's a food for thought.