Fresh tomato soup with sourdough bread

The other day Meghan announced that she makes sourdough bread and that she had a 4 year old culture. As non of us have ever made this type of bread, she very kindly volunteered to share the culture with us and show us how to bake the bread.

Feeding the starter

Ingredients:
200 gr strong flour
50 gr wholemeal flour
50 gr sourdough starter
200 gr water

1. Measure flours and sourdough starter into a non reactive bowl together
2. After heating water, add to bowl and gently mix with hand. Flour  and starter should be indistinguishable, but does not have to be perfectly mixed
3. Cover the bowl with tea towel and sit on the counter overnight or all day.
Pour into a non reactive container (plastic sealed bag, glass container, etc) and store in the fridge
4. Try to feed at least every 3 weeks or a day before a planned bake

Smelling the yeast starter. Lovely and sweet

Meghan explaining the process

Meghan overseeing Angeles' kneading

Looking at the tomatoes that I pick a few weeks ago but were still only just turning then,  they are now nice and ripe, ready for soup.

We made  this with Garden Fresh Tomato Soup

and Low Fat No tahini  humus using yoghurt

and the carrot top and hazelnut pesto

Hi Karina

Allow the starter that is currently on your counter to incubate until this evening. I would put it in the fridge overnight, since you fed it early in the day today.

The starter looks great! If you want to do a quicker bread just shorten all the times and add about 2g of instant yeast to the dough when you do the salt. This will quicken the rise and you won’t have to do it overnight.

Then follow Hugh's recipe

I would time it this way:

- do a second feed this morning (50g starter, 200g white, 50g wholemeal and 200g warm water); store a portion of yesterday’s starter in the fridge in bag or container now. It will be happy for 3 weeks

- start the dough around 1 pm, and as you have added the 2 g instant yeast as it will rise quickly. 

- I would do one rise in the mixing bowl until almost doubled, and a second rise shaped into the bannetons.

- bread should be ready by 6pm to bake! 

overnight in the fridge

The end result 

Apple harvesting and pressing

Just checked his week's weather forecast and it seems like we should have a lovely sunny week ahead of us. Shannon had contacted me the other day to see if we could come and harvest apples from her garden. Now the outlook is so positive, I have decided to harvest on Tuesday at 10am and press whatever we have going spare on Thursday morning at 10am.

Indian inspired - runner bean samosas

Abby, Melendra, Meghan, Angeles, Carmen and Glo enjoying our starter

It has taken some time for the runner beans to thrive but it seems that the sunny but cool last weeks have kicked them into action.

So today we harvested them in turned them into runner bean samosas and tzakini sauce and sweet chilli jam.



For starter we will harvest the fennel for the fennel and leek soup

Fennel in the garden

Carmen and Abby harvesting the Fennel

Melendra picking runner beans

Leeks and the yoghurt dip

Mehan, Melendra and Karina picking runner beans

Karina showing how to use the  bean slicer

filling for the samosas


Although a little pale, the Samosas were crisp and tasty, delicious with the curried rice and lettuce and tomatoes out of the garden. Yumm

Beetburgers with Salad

Today we made beetburgers with the beetroot from my garden with a lovely fresh salad with leaves, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers from the allotment and boiled potatoes with chives.
Personally I would reduce the amount of flour, probably half it.

Whilst we were there we harvested some butternut squashes for future use, so they will go into storage for another day.

We ate the beet burgers with some bread and butter pickle as well as some sweet chilli jam.

As a dessert we had some poached pears (from Glo's garden), raspberries (yellow and red) with some greek yoghurt  topped with elderberry syrup. A veritable feast.

Sushi making with Seiko

This week my good friend, Seiko,  from Japan paid us a visit and happened to be here at the same time as our cooking session. We changed our plans and have decided to make it a Japanese session with Sushi and Furoshiki making.

We had great fun and a delicious meal with sushi,and a vegetable soup.

To make the rice we use Sushi rice and added some Kombu in the rice cooker

for the vinegar we had
5 tbs Rice vinegar
3 tbs sugar
1 tbs salt


We made Kinshi Tamago (egg omelet)
3 eggs
1tbs Sugar
pinch of salt

For the Shitake Mushroom (5)
1 tbs sugar
1/2 tbs soy sauce
2 1/2 tbs dashi  (soaking liquid)

The soup we used vegetables from the garden (onion, broccoli stem, carrots, red pepper,  the left over mushroom soaking liquid and a stock cube for a little extra flavouring.


Whilst the soup was simmering we had a Furoshiki demonstration on how to make a shopping/handbag out of a square cloth.

Courgette and apple chutney

I used Glo's pears and Tom's elderberries instead of dried fruit.

After a holiday I had taken my eye off the ball and low and behold I had some whoppers of courgettes. I also harvested some apples the other day and had some left over  so with today's from spade to plate group we made Courgette and Apple chutney

As this recipe asked for a lot of vegetables to be grated, Jenny and Peng Un were in charge of the food processor. Here they are in action

Meanwhile  June, Glo, Rozenn and Melendra, chopped and chatted around the kitchen table.

Sarolta mixed all the spices to go into the mix.  We mixed them all together and left it to marinate for 30 minutes whilst we headed to the allotment to pick the tomatoes and take in the autumn air. 

It was sunny and a lovely temperature, blessed again after such a wonderful summer.

We also went out into the back garden to pick more tomatoes, carrots  and basil for our soup.

For lunch we have some fresh tomato soup 
with some home made bread