Crackers

Ever since I read Joe Pastry's post on crackers I've been experimenting with them. And with the tools for making them.

This lot have feta and caraway seeds in the mix …


… and I used all of these tools to make them:


On the right there is the roller-cutter that came with my pasta machine. It's good for cutting nice even rows of crackers, but it sticks and drags a bit if the dough is soft, in which case I use the knife on the left. Next to the knife is a pizza docking roller. I bought it specially for crackers, I don't dock pizza. Next to that is my latest tool. It's a tracing wheel, for transferring markings from paper patterns to fabric. It happens to be very good at making perforated lines on crackers so you can easily break them into smaller bits.


Recipe

Feta and caraway crackers

Ingredients
2 cups flour
3 tbsp olive oil
~3 tbsp sourdough starter
1 tsp baking powder
100 g feta
1 tbsp caraway seeds
1/2 tsp salt
water
salt for sprinkling

Method
Mix flour, salt, and baking powder, rub in feta until there are no lumps.
Add all the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
Add sufficient water to make a not-soft-but-not-stiff dough. Mix.
Leave to rest for 1/2 hour or so.
Roll out using a pasta machine or rolling pin, to about 1/8 inch thick.
Dock with roller or fork. Sprinkle the tops with ground rock salt, or any other large grained salt.
Cut into squares, put on baking tray and bake at 180°C until lightly browned and dry.
Cool on rack, then store in an air-tight tin.

Current sausages

Most of the fermented sausages I've made recently are now ready to eat. The only one left hanging in the pantry (I had to move them out of the spare shower when I had visitors and the weather is cool enough now to be able to keep them elsewhere anyway) is the saucisson d'Alsace. It'll probably be ready in another couple of weeks. Here is a sample platter:

They are, clockwise from top left; Venison salami seasoned with white pepper and garlic; a pork salami seasoned with garlic, cinnamon, allspice, cumin, and nutmeg; Spanish chorizo, which has garlic, cayenne, and both sweet and hot pimentón; and hare salami with garlic and a lot of black pepper.

The Spanish chorizo is delicious, this is the third time I've made it and it will be something I make fairly regularly for the foreseeable future. It's also quick to make (ready in 2-3 weeks), which is nice.
The pork salami with cumin etc is an adaptation of a recipe for sujuk. The recipe said to use lamb and beef if I remember correctly, but I had pork so that's what I used. I can't imagine it would taste as good made with lamb, this is the nicest salami I've made so far. You can't notice the cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, I think they just round out the flavours; the strongest taste is cumin.
The hare and venison salamis would benefit from being made with pork back fat instead of the random pork fat I got from the butcher. They're perfectly nice, but the texture isn't quite right. They're also seasoned mainly with pepper, which is a little boring. On the other hand, turning these meats into salami has removed all traces of "gamey" flavours from them. This was the prime motivator in the case of the hare - Stephen, who shoots the game I get, dislikes the gaminess of the hares' back legs.
I'm looking forward to trying the saucisson d'Alsace, it also has cakey sorts of spices in it, but with the addition of rum.

Kumfs

I've had my eye on these for a while now, I went in yesterday and bought them with my tax refund money.


Kumfs is a New Zealand brand that makes super-comfortable shoes. They've only recently branched out into fashion shoes, for a long while they only made the sort of shoes that 80 year old ladies and people with foot problems wear. They are still of that quality, with built-in arch supports and very soft leather, but they've realised they can make them look good too. There are even a few styles with high heels, and some very nice looking boots. Comfort comes at a price of course, all the shoes are around $230 and the boots are $300 upwards.

I think these will be getting a fair bit of wear. Today I'm wearing them with a black merino twinset, black opaque tights, a soft floppy short cream skirt with big black polka dots, and a double string of my mother's old fake pearls. A complete stranger stopped me in the street to tell me I looked nice!

I need a name for this cocktail

Each glass has one scoop of lemon curd ice cream blended with 25ml vodka and two frozen Omega plum halves, floated on top of 25ml Crème de Mûre.

Half drink, half dessert.

Bits and pieces

I didn't need all the pasta I made yesterday for last night's dinner, I had one chicken thigh left over from the weekend, I had some slices of my hare salami that hadn't been eaten, and there was plenty of left over pesto, so these got turned into tonight's dinner.

I sliced the salami slices across to make batons and quickly fried them in a pan before adding the thinly sliced chicken thigh. Once it was cooked I boiled the pasta then tossed it with the salami batons and a tablespoon of pesto and put the chicken on top:

Does pesto count as a green vegetable?

Pasta for dinner

One of Wil's friends came for dinner last night; I made pasta.



Pasta made from 375g flour, three eggs, and a little water:


Omnivorous pasta sauce; chicken, bacon (home cured by my brother's father-in-law), mushrooms, zucchini, onions, garlic, cream:


Vegetarian pasta sauce; as above, minus the chicken and bacon, plus some porcini powder for extra mushroominess:


Our dinners, with a good healthy spoonful of basil and parsley pesto on top of each serving:


And to top them off, the parmesan I made last year:


That's half of the pasteurised milk with no added lipase version in the front, behind that is half of the raw milk version that was a bit of a failure due to a mechanical failure of the cheese press. I.e. my home-made cheese press is ever so slightly tapered, the cheese was small, and the follower couldn't get far enough down the mould to compress the cheese properly. Hence all the the holes. I almost threw it out when I first made it, but then I figured I wasn't losing anything by keeping it and seeing how it turned out, so I did. It's actually not too bad. I have high hopes of the most recent attempt, which is made from pasteurised milk with lipase added and is making the downstairs beer fridge smell "like sick" as my granddaughter said when she visited, but which will not be ready to taste for a few months yet.