Good Food Day!

Yesterday was a good day for food! 

It has been a pretty hectic and strange couple of weeks - I've been made redundant for a start so have been beefing up the ol' CV and applying for jobs again. It's not all bad though, I don't think this was the right job for me and so moving on is actually a positive thing.

So, after being really busy last week I wanted to EAT. Yesterday (Sunday) I was lucky enough to eat twice at Brixton market, breakfast with Mum and Dad at the Brick Box Cafe in the village, where I had a buckwheat galette generously filled with good cheese, herbs and crispy bacon, with a fried egg on top. Well tasty. (Top pic is Brixton Village)

My friend Cat was in the area for lunch, so to kill time I went to the farmers market on Brixton Station Road and bought some quality streaky bacon, and a beautiful creamy Wye of Bath cheese from a lovely and helpful chap at the Bath Soft Cheese Company. Most of this cheese has already been nibbled away, it's bloomin delicious. 10am - 2pm every Sunday, and although there aren't that many stalls, all of them have great produce - I will be back!

Lunch was Japanese 'Tapas' at Curry Ono just off Market Row (pics with prawns!). This was really good, and the staff very friendly, made even better by the complimentary miso soup, yum. My favourite dish was the marinated prawns, sharp and spicy and cooked perfectly. Entertainment came in the form of a drunk guy outside, displaying his clearly shoplifted prizes on one of their tables...Brixton has a fascinating dynamic and mix of people, most good, some worrying, but I love it all the same. Our final treat was tea and triple choc cookies at the Relay Tea Rooms, a really cute and tiny place with china cups and saucers, and homemade treats.

The bottom picture is my creation - after watching 2 episodes of masterchef I was feeling creative...well hungry somehow...and so using the bacon and savoy cabbage from the market, along with some ageing kale and potatoes and eggs from the 'rents chickens, I rustled us up some dinner. Kale and savoy cabbage with bacon, onions and garlic, lemon roasted potatoes crushed with parmesan and a fried egg to finish.  

It was a gluttonous day but a final treat before unemployment, this week is all about leftovers and thrift :-)

Simple Pleasures

Bread! I bloody love bread. It's actually magic. 4 basic ingredients and you end with one of our most loved and oldest foodstuffs. The smell sells houses, or so they say, and it comes in more tasty manifestations than you can shake a stick at.

My Dad recently showed me how to make my own bread and for Christmas I got an electric food mixer which is my new favourite toy and I use to knead the dough. In the pics above is soda bread, which is quicker to make than your usual yeast baked bread, and is so very delicious served warm with a dippy egg - nothing fancy, but it made 2 hungry boys and 1 hungry me quite happy this morning. 

There is something supremely satisfying about making your own bread, and of course you benefit from knowing exactly what is in it and that it contains no chemicals and preservatives. I won't lie, making a traditional yeast based loaf is quite time consuming (whereas soda bread you can be eating within the hour) and you have to nail the technique, but honestly it's worth it. I'd like to have all the fancy equipment like baking stones and proving baskets but it seems to be working without - you don't even really need the mixer - and I'm finding it works out reasonably cheap.

Because of the technique involved, I won't post a recipe for a basic yeast risen loaf. I have a great book that I would recommend, the River Cottage Handbook 3, which explains it all but there are plenty of books out there showing you how or you'll probably find a recipe online. I just like to have books :-) they are nice.

Anyway, I have to see to my marmalade (which I think I may have messed up..) It would be great to hear from anyone else who has discovered the joy of home made bread - oooh it's dead good. 

The Whys and Wherefores

My ambition for this blog is really to be a release. 

I'm generally a bit rubbish - very indecisive, over analytical and slightly neurotic. And I worry too much. The combination of these factors had lead me down a path I wouldn't have necessarily chosen if my fairy godmother had waved her wand and said, 'you shall have the career of your dreams!'

The other thing about me, crucial to the creation of this blog, is that I am never satisfied. Yes, I have a job which I work hard at, I can pay rent, it's all...fine...but something's missing. The things in life that excite me, really, are food and photography. That is, as well as travel, singing in harmony (with other people, obvs) or seeing a particularly magical film (most recently, The Artist, a flipping triumph in my opinion).

My worrisome and neurotic side, I think, prevented me from following a career into photography for example. I never thought I was good enough. I'm logical, not artisic, and I convinced myself that my career would surely be founded in organising, not creating, and so started in media production. I can organise the crap out of anything. Apart from this, life just got in the way, you know, earning a living and doing the laundry and that. Poor excuse I know. Somwhere in the back of my mind though was always the panic that if I truely tried, I might fail. So it was always just a hobby.

Boo hoo, sorry.

Anyway, so this blog is a way for me to actively follow up on some things that I like doing. Cooking, eating and taking pics primarily but we'll see where it goes. I always wanted to try my hand at writing as well, after all I did win a creative writing prize when I was 7 at our school's Eisteddfod, so I must be good at it.

Mostly, I find the time to cook on Sundays, and 'Omnom' is just a great vocalisation of someone enjoying food. I hope people enjoy what I post, it may take me some time to get into it but I will try and put something up every couple of weeks to start, and then every week eventually. 

Oh and finally, I will probably still muck around with the layout and background, but don't be alarmed, change is good!