Since 6 months I have been making my own bread. When I tell people that I don’t buy bread anymore but just make it myself I usually get reactions like, ‘wow you must have too much time on your hands’ or ‘oh I would love to do that but just don’t have enough time’. The interesting thing is, it actually doesn’t take that much time.

Doesn’t that look nice? So how much time did this take?
10 minutes mixing ingredients + 5 minutes shaping the dough

Ok, ok, fair enough, you don’t have a bread in 15 minutes. After mixing the ingredients you need to let the dough rise for 1 hour. I normally use this time to: read, watch tv, play music, go for a run.. so, things that you actually should do in your free time anyway!

Then after this hour, you need to shape the dough, and put it in the oven. Then, you have another 20 + 20 minutes to do nice things! I say 20 + 20 because normally I put the bread one level lower in the oven to prevent it from becoming black. I also take this chance to spray some extra water in the oven so you get this nice crunchy crust. After 40 minutes you could eat it right away, but it’s better to let it cool down for an hour or so.

I think my meal worm experiment has come to an end. The first batch of beetles all died (of age!) and I’m getting some new ones but I just realized that it is not so exciting anymore. Where I used to spend an hour a day looking at the beetles and worms wiggling around I now leave them in a box and have to remember to give them some fresh flour and a new carrot once in a while.

I have a couple 100 grams of frozen meal worms and ready to be used in a meal and even there I have to say. Eating them is also not so exciting anymore. I have baked some in the oven to use as a snack, and I have put them in my fried rice but I can’t say I’m excited to cook with them.

It was an interesting experiment but a replacement for some of the meat we eat, no, not at this point.

I ran out of sweet chilli sauce (because you can put it on almost everything) so made a fresh bottle. When I was making my curry, I actually thought it was fun to make pictures along the way, so I did the same with my sweet hot sauce today.

As you can see, only a couple of ingredients this time:
– 1 small onion
– 1 clove of garlic
– an empty bottle (I used an empty soy sauce bottle)
– herb vinegar (you can also make this with rice vinegar)
– sugar
– a chilli (I used one of my super hot 7pods)

The body of the sauce will mostly be the vinegar and the sugar. The ratio vinegar:sugar is about 1:1.5. So I put about 1.5 cup of vinegar and a bit more than 2 cups of sugar (yes, that’s a lot of sugar!!).

Chop the onion and garlic in small pieces en fry them quickly with some oil. Put everything together (chili in small pieces) and mix everything. I use an immersion blender to mix and chop all the things extra fine.

Then in a small pan and heat. After a while, taste! The sharpness of the vinegar should be out.

Finally, put it in the bottle. Perfect for on: Everything!
 

After a holiday in Thailand I have been experimenting a bit with making my own curry paste. I use this as basis for my curries. Today I made some photos along the way.

First, some ingredients:

– 3 or 4 small onions
– 2 cloves of garlic
– some Coriander
– some dried bay laurel leaves
– a piece of ginger
– lemon grass
– some mushrooms
– a sweet potato
– a carrot
– a zucchini/courgette
– 500ml coconut milk
– 1 table spoon of coriander seeds
– 1 tea spoon of cumin
– 1/2 tea spoon of cove
– 1/2 tea spoon cinnamon
– some chili!
– 200-300 gram of chicken sliced in small pieces and marinated with 2 table spoons of soy sauce
– 1 table spoon of thai fish sauce
– 1 table spoon of lemon juice
– 1 table spoon of sugar

Crush the coriander seeds, cumin, cove and cinnamon.Put everything in a blender / food processor and add the onions, garlic, ginger, coriander, lemon grass ( I already cut this in small slices) and blend until you have a nice paste.

Cut the vegetables in small cubes.

Put the paste in a pan with 3 table spoons of vegetable oil and stir on high fire for about 5 mins. Add some water when it gets too dry. You can also add the laurel leaves, sugar, fish sauce and lemon juice. I sometimes also add half a block of chicken bouillon to give it a bit of salty kick ( up to you ).

Add the vegetables without the mushrooms (I always add them the last) and leave for another 5 minutes, but on a medium heat.

Then you can add the coconut milk and leave again for a while. Then add the chicken (with soy sauce )

and the mushrooms. Taste a spoon of the sauce ( be careful, HOT ) and add sugar/salt/pepper/chili as you wish.

Wait until the chicken and sweet potato are done and then serve with some white rice. Hmmmm