How is it nearly JULY already?

I promise this won't be a monthly thing - constantly harping on about the way time seems to be speeding up, when all along we know it's all part of the theory of relativity; the each passing month and year being, relatively speaking, a smaller part of the whole thing.

Anyway, things do seem to be going rather quickly. Like when, during a meeting with a mortgage advisor (another story...) this evening I said I'd been working for four weeks. The Kiwi corrected me with the actual story - six. Six weeks of brain-melting, mind-bending getting my head around not only the wacky world of insurance but a rather labyrinthine group of companies to boot. It's a weird one - a massive mental challenge in understanding stuff, but comparatively little in the way of stuff to, like, do. Still, I'm keeping myself busy by making outlandish promises and then struggling to keep up with them, usual story.

In other news, we have a dining room table! This is a bigger deal than it perhaps sounds, but I'll not go into the detail. Trust me, it's changed our lives. Eating sitting at a table still feels like a bit of a luxury. That, and being able to go places without cadging a lift off the Kiwi or ruining yet another pair of shoes. The car is turning out to be a lot of fun, something to look forward to at the end of the day. It's in the garage at the moment having its wheel alignment done, which I'm hoping will correct a little niggle it's been having lately where the power steering gets a bit twitchy.

Here's a thing for all of you back in the land of sensible driving: the New Zealanders are well known for their love of adrenalin sports, being the No.1 place in the world for life-threatening leisure pursuits. This extends to driving, apparently, with a road rule (A RULE!) which says that if you're turning right into a road, and an oncoming car is turning left into the same road, the oncoming car has to give way. They sort of slow down and tuck their car into the kerb, whilst you wait to see if they actually are stopping or not, and they keep moving because they don't know whether you're going to turn ahead of them or not, and then you both step on it at the same time and narrowly avoid a collision with either the car in question or one of the many which get bored of waiting and swerve around you both. This rule appears to be designed to make even the simplest manoevre something which gets the heart pumping and the adrenalin flowing. I'm not keen on it, as you might have guessed.

Other than that, not a lot's been going on. We work, we cook, we sleep. And it's brilliant.

How is it JUNE already?

Seriously, I turn around for five minutes and half the year's gone - is this what getting old's all about? A gentle nudge from my sister reminded me yesterday that I'd not actually posted anything in quite some time, let alone anything that wasn't about baking, so here we are - another post which might not be all about breadmaking.

Work has been taking up an indecent amount of my time lately, as I seem to remember it doing back in 2008, and on the whole things seem to be going well. The pace is somewhat slower than I'm used to, so on the one hand I can seem reasonably dynamic without too much effort, and on the other the stress levels probably aren't as high. The Kiwi, on the other hand, seems to spend her entire day moving at 100kph, so we're in slightly different zones for an hour or so once we get home.

What I'm doing at the moment isn't really for discussion this openly, but suffice it to say we're making some very definite plans to move forward, taking overall company strategy and working out ways to implement it in some hopefully market-changing ways. If my plans come together, all should become clear. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I bought a car today - my first one ever (aged 31). Living either in Manchester or London, both places with pretty good public transport networks, I've never really needed a car more than four or five times a year, so renting has always been good enough. However, living in Auckland, not having a car basically means you either remain confined to a walking distance around your house (during which you will get rained on), or put yourself at the mercy of public transport, which effectively means you will probably get where you want to go, but probably not before the moon has gone once around the earth.

So, and I know precisely who's going to take the piss at this point, I bought this:

Quite simply, I have always wanted a sports car. On the shopping list for me were the following:

• Engine in the back
• Two seats
• Roof that comes off

... and this little Toyota ticks all those boxes (even if it is technically mid-engined) and fits neatly into my price bracket. Whilst it's only a 1.8L, it weighs about as much as a matchbox and thus manages to be quite, um, quick, whilst the proportions make it superbly balanced. I drove four of them yesterday and any lingering doubt that I was doing the right thing went right out of the window. So, provided it passes its AA inspection next week, it will be mine before the weekend.

It has a frankly hilarious storage ability, about enough room for an overnight bag and a pork pie, but that's part of its charm, I reckon. Anyway, it's my first car. Forgive me for getting a bit gushy about it.

On the bread front (and I couldn't write a post without it), I've been baking every weekend, with the exception of the one we went away for recently (to Mount Maunganui, by the seaside). The bread's getting steadily better, with the flavour deepening and mellowing, and the texture getting more relaxed and open. I have two loaves proving right now in fact, basking in the glow of our electric heater along with the Kiwi. It's cold here at the moment, cold and sunny, and our electric heater, oil-filled heater and dehumidifier have been working overtime. Can't wait to see our power bill for this month...

Second sourdough batch

Before I begin, let me put your mind at ease - although I do intend to bake a couple of sourdough loaves every weekend, I'm not going to blog about each of them in turn. I thought I'd mention this week's as we're still in the early days of the process and the first one of this batch turned out a little odd.

I bought a new loaf tin this week, so I can bake two at once, instead of having to spend literally the whole weekend with something either baking or proving. This one's actually a little slimmer than the other, so it's producing a taller loaf. I've noticed that the base of this loaf turned out completely solid for about a centimetre up, which I'm putting down to there being too much dough in the tin - it would've risen past the top during the second prove if there hadn't been a teatowel covering it. I'm thinking that the weight of the dough on top flattened out the base a bit during this prove, possibly - the top was also unusually flat, so it didn't seem to rise much in the oven.

The texture on the whole is still looking good; getting more open still, and still nicely elastic. I'm a bit concerned about what seems to be a slightly moist, rubbery quality to it, which I'm putting down to fractional underbaking. Cooler for longer next weekend, I think, this could be me needing to get to grips with my oven. Flavour-wise I think I'm onto something good here, the sourness is really coming out now and the bread has a big, full flavour right through the crust. It's gaining character.

This far it's being mainly used for morning toast, and to accompany cheese. I may start attempting sandwiches with it at some point but I have yet to see what my new job's lunch arrangement is, so we'll see if it's worth bothering before going down that path. There's talk of a wine, cheese and bread event going on at our local wine merchant, so I need to get my bread in shape for that - there's some serious amateur bakers attending and I don't want to be shown up!

First loaves!

It's been a month or so in gestation, but my sourdough starter came of age this weekend. Hoping that it was finally stable, I made a couple of loaves out of it. Things seemed to go well, so I've stopped feeding it and it lives in the fridge now, instead of the sunny spots in the living room. The whole process to date has been about building a yeast colony which is stable - as you may remember from earlier posts, in the early days it changed appearance and smell quite frequently as the yeasts and various bacteria etc tried to reach equilibrium. Over the past week, it's been fairly unchanging, so I'm assuming that's proof of stability.

So, two loaves this weekend. I only have one loaf tin at the moment, so I'm making them in sequence rather than in parallel. Fortunately that gave me a bit of opportunity to make some changes to the second one. So here's the first:


Not a bad start, I reckon. It's a bit wonky, which doesn't really come across in the photo, but the texture is good, nice and elastic if a little less open than I was expecting. The crust is good too, and the flavour's typically sour, with a good depth and a nice, rounded fruity hint. I'm not happy that it split so much, and how lopsided the top is. A bit of research suggests this might be due to an overly speedy prove.

And so here's the second one - a much better shape, possibly due to an extra hour on the second prove. It got right up to the top of the tin this time (the first one fell a little short) before it went in the oven, so I think I need to benchmark it right there. This probably helped the shape too.


So there we go. I'm going to aim to do this every weekend (although I'll be getting a second bread tin, you mark my words), as it's not that much of a hassle. Friday night, combine starter, flour and water, feed the original starter. Saturday morning, beat in more flour and a bit of salt. Five or six hours later, bake. By my reckoning, excepting electricity charges, two loaves of sourdough a week should cost me about $2.30ish for the flour.

Still need to work on that shape though. Will be interesting to see how the flavour develops as the starter matures.

Excuses, excuses...

I've just noticed that the cheesy little Nike+ widget in the right-hand bar on this page is gently making fun of the fact that I've not been for a run in a while. The truth is that I have, but my Nike+ sensor has run out, so I need to buy a new one, which won't happen until I get paid. I'm still putting 50k a month in, don't you worry, it's just not being recorded.

Honest.

Brilliant

The waiting is over - this week I agreed terms with an employer, and I start work on the 19th May. After five months of not working, this is an overwhelming relief. We're not entirely out of the woods yet though, as there are bills to be paid at the end of this month which my pro-rated pay won't cover, but hopefully a client for whom I've been doing a little work back in the UK will actually bother to pay me for it at some point during this month.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much being unemployed had affected me. Friends of mine have told me in the past that my job (whatever it was at the time) was always far too important to me, and it's true to an extent that my sense of self-worth is entirely wrapped up in what I do for a living. So to be out of work, to me, is to have no social worth. Entertainingly, I don't view other people like this - this rule only applies to me, you understand. The Kiwi and I had a celebratory curry on Thursday night and I realised that I was smiling properly for the first time in ages; smiling with total happiness, without that lurking feeling that had been telling me up to this point that, until I had a job, I had nothing to smile about.

So I suppose there should be a learning experience here in finding self-worth in places other than the workplace, but I suspect I'll not really take it on board. This is the usual way of things.

And what of the job? Well, suffice it to say it's in the insurance industry, and involves me forming and implementing a strategy for the online channel. Currently the online arm of the business is... me, but over time it'll need to grow. The main challenge in moving a mainly offline business to a true multi-channel one is predominantly a cultural one, and although the top level of this organisation is open to the concept, it'll be convincing the troops that'll be the 'pushing water uphill' element of this particular engagement, I suspect.

I'm going to remain coy in this forum about who it is, so I can be reasonably open about how it's going, but most of you probably know. Very excited about starting indeed, they're a good bunch of people from what I can see, with a very clear and pragmatic view on the next steps for their business. Prior to that, though, I have a week of genuine holiday to get through, so with that, it's back to my baking... on which more later!

How to stretch a chicken

Today, I made chicken stock for the first time in ages. There's something very ritualistic and soothing about doing this, the preparation, the slow simmering, the straining and the portioning out into 500ml portions to freeze. If you have a freezer and a stove, and you don't make your own stock, you're cheating yourself out of the one thing that'll make your cooking taste really, really good. With no freezer in our rented flat in London, I've been grimacing at powdered stock in food for too long now.

Although the Kiwi now has a job (yay!), we're still very much on a budget, so I thought I'd see if I could stretch the bird a little further than normal. When I jointed it for the stock, I peeled the breasts off with the peg-bone attached (a supreme, I believe), and jointed the rest for the stock pan. These, once marinated in sumac, lemon, pomegranate molasses, garlic and thyme and olive oil for a while, were served on a bed of couscous for dinner tonight.

The stock, once simmered for three and a half hours, was strained, and whilst I would normally have chucked the resultant sieve-full of veg and chicken bits away, I took out the chicken pieces and whizzed the veg in the blender with a little stock to loosen it. Chopped and bones and gristle removed, the chicken went back into the mix. With a bit of seasoning and possibly some cumin, this will be tomorrow's lunch. Granted, most of the flavour in the pan went into the stock itself, and so the soup is a little less punchy than I'm used to, but needs must.

Tomorrow evening's dinner will be paella. The depth of the flavour will come from the stock absorbed by the rice grains, and the prawns and squid rings cooked in it. Two blocks of stock are also in the freezer, to be used at some point in the future. By my reckoning, that's three meals for two, plus the two more I'll get out of the frozen stock. Quite pleased with myself, I am.

Oh, and this weekend, if the starter's up to it, I'll bake my first sourdough loaf!