Bacon and Cheddar Scrolls

I've started doing my shopping in Sainsbury's a lot more - there's a large store only a few minutes' drive from my house, but as I'm still a relative novice when it comes to driving, I only go first thing or I struggle to get into the spaces in their car park! I recently picked up a copy of Sainsbury's magazine at the till and found lots of recipes inside that I wanted to make. As my fiancé loves bacon and would eat a bacon sandwich for lunch every Saturday and Sunday every week if he could, I get rather bored of it (so he gets a bacon sandwich every few weeks). As soon as I saw this recipe for 'bacon and cheddar scrolls' I knew it would be a winner with both of us as it was something different but still within the bacon category!

This recipe makes quite a few (I can't remember exactly how many) so to serve two people I would halve the quantity.

400g wholemeal bread flour
100g white bread flour
7g yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
50g melted butter
1 tbsp light brown sugar
300 ml lukewarm water

For the filling:
4tbso grainy mustard
8 cooked rashers streaky bacon, crumbled or sliced
100g grated mature Cheddar cheese
3 spring onions, trimmed and sliced

In a large bowl, mix the flour and yeast. In another bowl,  mix the melted butter, water and sugar. Fold in the flour.

Knead for ten minutes if doing by hand; otherwise about five minutes in a stand-mixer (I was very glad of my Kitchenaid at this point!). Grease a large bowl and put the ball of dough inside. Cover with clingfilm and leave in a warm place for about two hours to prove until doubled in size.

Roll out the dough into a rectangle on a lightly-floured surface and spread with the filling.

Roll up from the long edge like a Swiss roll and slice into rounds.

Lay each slice on its side on a greased and lined baking tray, cover with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place to prove until doubled in size. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 200 C and bake the rolls for 20-25 minutes. Best served warm as part of a breakfast or brunch, but you could also leave these to go cold and take them on a picnic.

I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Lucy at BakingQueen74.

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread and Vegetable Soup

Last weekend I decided to make soup and bread for lunch. I had a packet of diced vegetables that were called 'soup mix', the idea being you just bung them all in a pan with some stock. I'd planned to set my breadmaker machine the night before so we could have nice fresh bread in time for lunch - and completely forgot.

Was I going to have to give up on the idea of having fresh bread with soup (or send the reluctant other half out to buy some)? Surely there must be a quick bread recipe out there that I could make in a couple of hours from start to finish (I didn't get up very early on the Sunday morning so lunch was only a couple of hours away!). Luckily, there was: there are bread recipes you don't need to leave to prove, and this is one of them.

It's a recipe from the Telegraph for 'easy beer bread with parmesan and garlic'. I think the beer replaces yeast and all you have to do is mix everything and cook it for just under an hour.

I did change the recipe a fair bit as I didn't have buckwheat flour, polenta, fresh thyme and couldn't be bothered to go into the garden to see if I still had any rosemary (it was raining!), oh and I did't have any parmesan either! Instead I looked in the fridge to see what I did have and decided to create my own flavour of mature cheddar and chilli. I also forgot to add the little bit of butter at the end but it was fine without. So here's what I did:

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

260g strong white bread flour
100g wholemeal plain flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
60g caster sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
50g mature cheddar, diced
2 tsp Very Lazy chopped red chillis
300ml bottle beer

Preheat oven to 190C and grease a loaf tin. Mix all the dry ingredients.

Add the beer and mix in well

Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes

In the meantime here is my soup mix, which I simply simmered with some vegetable stock until the veg was soft, then put it in a blender.

I added some more water as it was a bit thick

 

 Here's the finished loaf of bread

The garlic, cheese and chilli flavours all came through really strongly, so this is a good bread to serve alongside a simple soup - one that perhaps doesn't have an overpowering flavour of its own.

Lunch! And possibly the fastest loaf of bread I've ever made.

I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen's Food and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy.

And also to Extra Veg, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Michelle at Utterly Scrummy again, and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

BBQ Pizza - Pizza cooked on the barbecue

Did you know that you can cook pizza on a barbecue? I've been trying out some different things this summer since we bought a Weber gas barbecue and came across this article on the Telegraph website from a couple of years back. As it points out, you need a barbecue with a lid you can close as this recreates the effect of a pizza oven. It also recommends using a pizza stone to avoid scorched patches of crust, which I did but I still had a few burnt bits!

The pizza dough is easy to make following the recipe given; you can top it with anything you like. I used passata, mozzarella, grated Cheddar and leftover sausage and bacon which was already cooked.

pizza dough

I used my giant pizza paddle from the Dot Com Gift Shop that was reduced from £16.95 to £5.95 in their sale. It was just the thing to lift the pizza and slide it onto the pizza stone.

As I had enough dough for two pizzas - and only one pizza stone to use on the barbecue - I cooked the other pizza in the oven. It was nice but the pizza cooked on the barbecue was actually much better! So give it a go if you have a gas barbecue this summer!

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers as their theme this month is barbecue.

 I'm also sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy and Jen's Food.

Olive and Rosemary Focaccia

 

 

Having a gas barbecue is brilliant - we've used it three times in the space of a week! We had four friends over on Saturday for a barbecue and as I didn't have much time, and we weren't a big group, I didn't want to go all out with the salads and side dishes. But at the same time I wanted to provide a couple of home-made things and wondered if there was anything I could make beginning with O that would fit this month's Alphabakes theme.

 

I decided that bread would be good to serve at a barbecue and that there must be something I could make using olives; a quick Google search found this recipe on Taste.com for olive and rosemary focaccia.

 

It was very easy to make, though I don't know how they got the perfectly round shape; I had trouble stretching mine evenly but I think that just makes it look more rustic! I had an open jar of green olives in the fridge I wanted to use up so I used those instead of the black olives recommended in the recipe and it still worked really well.

 

In the pictures below you can see how the yeast bubbles when the water is added, and how much the dough swells up. I used my Kitchenaid to knead it rather than doing it by hand.

 

 

I used rosemary from my garden - about the only useful thing the previous owners of our house left us, in the shape of my herb patch!

 

Here it is after baking

 

 It was easy to slice and had a very good crumb, and tasted delicious dipped in a little oil and balsamic vinegar. It went very well alongside the salad at the barbecue.

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter I have chosen this month is O.

I'm also sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen at Jen's Food and  Michelle at Utterly Scrummy.

And with Cooking with Herbs hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage.