Our ridiculous culture of copycats and characterless celebrities has spawned a phenomenon - the rise (he-he) of baking - about which I am ambivalent. It's great that people are being drawn into cooking of any sort; but it is annoying that in the way of these things some media outlets act as if a) baking is new to the world; b) only the photogenic (count me out then) should be doing this; and c) we suddenly need 50 programmes on the topic.
A rainy Sunday and I felt the need to do something physical and creative, so I made some pizza dough and ended up with an onion and cheese tart of sorts - rolled over edges, base cooked on its own for 10 minutes, then filled with onions sliced thinly and previously cooked until very soft in olive oil, plus some grated cheddar. The filled version needed another 15 minutes to finish.
It was meant to be a slice each for lunch with a small salad, and some left for my wife's pack-up tomorrow. We ate it all.
As far as austerity goes it was about 25p of bread flour, 5p of yeast, at the very most 35p of onions (I used red to brighten it up), and £0.75 for the cheese. Even allowing for under-estimates and the cost of heating the oven to maximum something that proved (he-he again) to be fresh, warm, and really tasty cost well under £2.
Actually the surplus dough made a small garlic bread and some breadsticks, so even more of a bargain.
I posted about the madness of us spending £13 billion on the Olympics in the foolish belief that it would change the health of the nation (or at least that was one of the reasons given). Teaching people to cook would have been a far better use of the dosh. Am I turning into Ed Balls, spending in my imagination the same notional money over and over again, as I had posted before about using some (a very small part) of those wasted funds to provide allotments for a million people?
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