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Showing posts from December, 2012

Lazy Housewife Roast Chicken Recipe

This is now one of my fail-safe recipes. I start on this at 5.30pm by turning the oven on to 220C, prep the ingredients, and put the dish in at 5.45pm when the oven is up to temperature. At 6.15pm I remove the lid and let the chicken continue to brown and crispen up for 15-20 minutes, hoping that husband gets home by 6.40pm or whenever to eat it with us. The important thing is to cover for the first two-thirds of cooking to prevent meat from drying out. I used to cook this in a roasting tray and cover with tin foil. I thought this was wasteful of tin foil. I tried buying a lid to fit the tray, but failed. Then while trying to bake sourdough bread discovered my husband's father's mother's enamel roasting tin that is rather ancient, hidden and forgotten in a dark corner in the cupboard. It looks like this, and I am borrowing an image and link from a well-known retailer for which I am not paid: http://www.lakeland.co.uk/13262/Traditional-Enamel-Round-Roaster It's a

Baking Bread -- is easier than you think

This is based on a post I put up earlier for friends in Singapore. After baking my bread today I came across this article . It does not take all that long to knead, but you must be patient with waiting for the dough to rise. I now gather all the ingredients together before starting and can get a lump of dough ready for first proofing within 20 minutes.   It's cheaper to buy a packet of yeast rather than the 7g sachets. In the UK and if you have room, you could also have bigger bags of flour delivered. Better still if you could get locally-grown and/or milled flour. You need STRONG flour. White, wholemeal, granary, whatever, or a combination. I now regularly use 1 kg of flour, usually a mix of wholemeal and white and/or granary. I normally make one loaf (about 950g wet weight) and turn the rest into rolls of about 70g (wet weight), some of which I take into the advice charity on Mondays just in case we get clients who have gone hungry or are homeless.   ===========