Dairy free Soda Bread, butter and Autumn sunshine at River Cottage

 A few months back I won a raffle for a place at a Foodies Blog Camp at River Cottage. We organised accommodation, M arranged leave and I wrote it on the calendar. All of a sudden (or so it seemed) this week dawned, blue skies full of early autumn sunshine, the leaves just beginning to turn and the air suddenly developing a crispness. Unmistakably autumnal.

River Cottage is beautiful at every time of year, but this week it seemed to have truly embraced the turning seasons. Golden raspberry canes spiked with the pretty fruit, pears ripening against the kitchen garden walls and the last sweetcorn husks awaiting hungry bloggers.

I left Harry and M ready for a Daddy-son day, full of soft play and sandcastles. As only the second time I've left Harry for any length of time, to say I was nervous is probably an understatement. I waved, blew kisses and sent love before steeling myself to clamber up the tractor steps for the rocky ride down to the farm. I had a lot of hope pinned on a lot of coffee (someone who shall remain nameless was awake at 4am).

After a much needed coffee (or two) our day began with bread and butter making.  Butter making wasn't new to me - I've used it for a few years now as an activity for Guides and Brownies - they love to see their cream, shaken in a jam jar begin to change, and are so proud when everyone has it on their muffins at tea time. I knew M would love some homemade butter, so got on with whisking like my arms depended on it, before squeezing out the buttermilk, rinsing and adding a little salt and thyme.

Everyone else used their buttermilk as the liquid in their soda bread - however, obviously we needed to keep my bread dairy free as I had every intention of Harry and I tucking in later. Apple juice was to be my liquid, and paired beautifully with the apples, foraged blackberries, thyme and sage in my loaf. I love soda bread and although we weren't given quantities, this is what I would use if I were to recreate it at home:

Autumn stuffed soda bread - dairy free
Serves 8

300g malted grain bread flour
200ml cider/ apple juice
1 dsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt
1 mug of foraged blackberries
1 eating apple, cored and chopped
1 sprig of thyme, leaves picked
3-4 sage leaves, rolled and sliced

Preheat your oven as hot as it will go
Lightly mix the flour, baking powder, salt, blackberries, apple, thyme and sage together before pouring in the cider/ apple juice and gently bringing the dough together
You don't need to knead soda bread dough so once the mixture is sticking together, simply shape it into a round before using the back of a knife to score the dough into 4 sections
Slide the loaf onto a greased baking sheet or preheated pizza stone
Heavily dust the dough with some more flour
Bake for 20 minutes

Allow to cool before enjoying as it is, or spread, liberally with some really good honey.

Still to come, some thoughts on the photography class and some of the pictures I took with M's DSLR - we think Harry has posted my point and shoot camera somewhere 'safe'

Meal Planning Monday: for when your get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went

The last couple of week's meal plans have been deliberately quick and easy. January being what January is, I was keen to keep it simple in the hope that straightforward eating would help manage those January blues. 

Sadly my January blues have hit full on this week. I was 'off plan' by Tuesday, it took me three days to eat a curry, I've not had a proper night's sleep all week, and my mood has dropped slowly but steadily. Today, I'm in my pyjamas watching Sunday brunch wondering just what I can cook this week to help with that. Or alternatively if I can cocoon myself in my duvet and stay there all week. 

I have a few tricks in my arsenal to manage these feelings - high doses of a Vitamin D supplement, lots of fruit and veg, and a determined approach to my running.  No one of these will make a difference, but all of them keep me distracted and enable me to keep on keeping on. 

So, this week - again, deliberately simple, healthy and hopefully enough to keep me going on. 

Breakfasts: Porridge, I've discovered a new fruity topping, which I think is going to make it into this month's favourites. 

Lunches: I'm actually out for much of the week, but am going to make a batch of Lifechanging soup today, portion it off and pop it in the freezer. I've got a pretty rubbish flask that I'm going to test out tomorrow and see if it will keep my soup hot till lunchtime. My ongoing search for a half decent flask seems never ending. Quite honestly if anyone knows of one that works would like to tell me, I'd be grateful!

Dinners: 

Monday: Sausages with mashed or baked potatoes (depending on when I get back from Birmingham) and braised red cabbage

Tuesday: I'm working away on Tuesday so am being rescued from the perils of the Beefeater by dinner with a friend.

Wednesday: M and I are ships in the night, so he's working away. I think I'll defrost some soup and possibly make some soda bread to go with

Thursday: Brownies, so more soup I think

Friday: we're going to see M's parents this weekend, so sadly no cooking next weekend. 

Reading this, I'm pretty sure you can tell how disinterested I am in all things culinary. I'm pretty sure I'll have shrugged it off soon enough - so hopefully normal service will resume shortly. 

Don't forget to pop on over to At Home with Mrs M to see what everyone else is up to this week (I'm sure other meal plans will be more exciting than mine. Let's face it, it's not hard) 

A person can develop a bad, bad cold: Split pea soup and soda bread

If you follow me on twitter you'll know this has been a poorly week in Penelope's Pantry. I've been completely wiped out by a virus/ infection that's manifesting itself through recurrent migraines. As you can imagine all thoughts of food and cooking have long gone out of the window, but by Friday I was just starting to feel a bit less like death warmed up. Then M came home from Newcastle. With the same bug/ virus. Now despite the fact that I have no energy, I've turned on Accu Broadway and am cooking my little heart out. I knew we needed some hearty, easily digestable, healing food and so I turned to Nigella.  I knew her recipes wouldn't fail and that I was bound to find something in one of her books that would sound attractive and not require much brainpower. Soup it was.

I've added this to Maison Cupcake's Forever Nigella blog hop for January - be sure to pop over and have a look at all the entries.

Nigella's Split Pea and Frankfurter soup (with a couple of Pantry amendments)

2 cloves garlic
1 celery stick
1 carrot, peeled
1 onion, peeled
500g yellow split peas
1250ml vegetable stock
Pack of frankfurters - I used Waitrose's own brand
1/2 tsp ground mace
3 tablespoons of rapeseed oil

Blitz the vegetables and garlic up in the food processor, and tip into the warmed oil in a large pan
Soften gently, but don't allow to colour
Add the mace, and stir in so it's evenly distributed
Add the split peas and stir in
Add the stock (I just used 4tsp of Marigold veg bouillon in a litre and a quarter of water)
Bring to a gentle boil, pop a lid on your pan and turn the heat down and cook for an hour
I found I needed to add another half a pint of water as my lentils had absorbed all the water making this more like a casserole in consistency than a soup
Add your chopped up frankfurters, then adjust your seasoning to taste (as they're quite salty I found)

At this point I felt that the soup was missing something so added a teaspoon of lazy chilli, once stirred through you don't get a huge kick of chilli but it adds a much needed warming depth. You could equally add fresh chilli at the start but it retained some of it's freshness by not cooking it through.

Serve hot with soda bread.

No Knead Soda Bread, based on this recipe but amended slightly

300g malted grain bread flour
1 pot buttermilk 284ml (isn't that an odd amount?)
1 dsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt


Preheat your oven as hot as it will go
Put the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix through roughly with clean hands
Add the buttermilk and mix (again, by hand) until you have a soft, pliable dough. I needed all the buttermilk, despite the original recipe stating less, but flour is a moveable feast, so if you don't need it all don't fret, everything just needs to come together.
Dust your worktop and hands lightly with more malted flour, and shape the dough into a round (now, if I can manage this with one arm in plaster anyone can)
Cut two dints in the loaf with either your spatula or a sharp knife

Bake for 20ish minutes - I do this on a pizza stone, as it normally results in a nice crispy bottom for loaves that aren't in a tin. Mine today took about 40 minutes, but that's probably down to having a slightly wetter dough. It's done when you can tap on the bottom and it sounds hollow, and when the top is lightly crusted.

That's our poorly Pantry tea tonight, it'll be served cwtched up on the sofa, under blankets hopefully with a shockingly fabulous film on in the background.