ReeHart – Blogging from the Heart

Posts Tagged ‘recipes’

Are bread machine mixes any good? Yes, some of them are, but the problem with all bread machine mixes is that they limit your choice and discourage your creative talents. That may sound a little harsh, but think about it for a minute. If you rely on bread machine mixes you can only make the bread for which you can find a bread machine mix and you can only put the bread machine mix in the bowl and switch the bread making machine on. You are not encouraged to alter the bread machine mix for fear that it won’t work.

What is the alternative? Well, the old-fashioned cookbook, of course! Not any old cookbook, but a specialized bread making machine recipe book. Bread making is a very simple, but rather tedious process. The ingredients are everyday, household items: water, flour, yeast, salt, sugar and oil. You already have those items in your cupboard with the possible exception of the yeast, which can be bought everywhere at low cost.

And I’m sure you already know what happens when you cook following a recipe, don’t you? You’ve read the recipe through and you know you have everything in the kitchen, but when the recipe calls for, let’s say, sultanas, you open the cupboard door and see that you don’t have any sultanas – they were currants! Oh, well you think, they’ll do. You make do. You experiment. And that means that you are developing your skills and creativity. Bread making mixes cannot and will not do that for you.

A good bread making machine cookbook will have well over 100 recipes coming from a number of different countries and you will become really enthusiastic about experimenting with the different ones. Have you ever tried Welsh bread – Bara Brith? Or Amish bread? Jalapeno bread or banana bread? Cranberry bread is lovely too, but one of my favourites is Brazil Nut Bread – absolutely scrumptious.

The fact is that you may not find recipes for all these breads in one recipe book, but if you have a safe starting point, like a bread recipe cookbook, you can begin by using previously tried and tested gourmet bread recipes and gradually develop your own – oftentimes because you have to.

I once made a really great loaf of bread by adding some of the leftover vegetables from my Sunday dinner. It was very delicious, however I could never quite make the same loaf again, try as I did many times, because I had not written down the weights of the added vegetables. I could only remember that I had added green beans, potatoes and sweet corn in it!

Bread machine mixes will never in a million years give you that, will they? And bread machine mixes are relatively expensive compared to the cost of 10 pounds. I usually vary the ingredients too: honey instead of sugar, milk instead of water, olive oil or butter instead of just corn oil. Rock salt instead of sea salt or visa versa. You get the picture.

Bread machine mixes are not only limited but limiting too. Furthermore, a bread making machine is a great way to use up leftovers. I have added meat and fruit in my gourmet bread many times. My guiding principle is: if it’ll go in a sandwich it’ll go in the dough – like an Indian stuffed paratha or stuffed naan bread.

Don’t waste your money buying bread machine mixes – instead be creative with a bread machine recipes cookbook.

You will expect different types of food from different restaurants – pub food, caf food, fast food, and fine dining all fall under the category of meals from food outlets. We all expect there to be a world of difference between a meal from a fast food joint and a dinner from an award winning restaurant, both in quality and price, but what about pub food? Is pub food freshly made or mass-produced? Just how healthy is this kind of food?

In Britain, pub food is usually known as “pub grub.” In the early twentieth century, this consisted of a cold snack such as a salad or shellfish vendors setting up stalls outside and selling cockles, mussels and whelks.

In the 1950s it was common to get “a pie and a pint,” with the steak and ale pies being made by the landlord’s wife. In the 1960s and 1970s, you could get chicken or scampi in a basket or, in Ireland, soda bread with Irish stew.

What is Modern Pub Food?

Pub food currently found in British pubs includes fish and chips, bangers and mash, hot pot, pasties, steak and kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, ploughman’s lunch and Sunday roast. International recipes such as chili con carne, curry, and lasagna are often served too. In Australia, the pub food menu will include bangers and mash, steak, chicken schnitzel, pub-style hamburger and fish, often served with mashed potatoes, chips or wedges and a salad.

Since the 1990s pub food has become a more important part of the pub experience and most public houses, serve lunch and dinner at the table instead of bar snacks at the bar. Some pubs serve top quality food, which can rival that of a good restaurant and the pubs at the far end of this scale call themselves “gastro pubs.” This word is a combination of the words pub and gastronomy and it was coined in 1991 when The Eagle, a pub in London, opened and started serving fine food.

What are We Really Being Served?

Not every pub is like The Eagle though and a lot of pubs nowadays are using the cheapest ingredients they can find. There is a reason why a pub kitchen might have ten microwaves and only four hob rings. Rather than the freshly made meal you might have got fifty years ago, your pub food is likely to consist of something that has been mass made in a food factory, packaged in cellophane, boxed and deep frozen.

Your chicken Marsala might have been made a year ago and been in the pub freezer all that time. One popular British pub chain only has two freshly made dishes on its menu and the rest are all frozen dinners but of course, they do not tell you that.

Eating pub food might be fine occasionally but there is no getting away from the fact that homemade food is better for you. Not only does it work out much cheaper but also you know exactly what ingredients are going into your homemade recipes and you will not add all the colorings, preservatives and other chemical additives found in a lot of pub food.