Olive and Rosemary bread

In between all the downpours, I've been diving outside, trying to tidy and sort out the garden a bit. Whilst like many gardeners I was hoping for a bit of rain to help the plant life, I think the continuous rain joke is now wearing a bit thin! I put a couple of Mediterranean veggies into pots the other day but unless we get some sun soon, their hopes of a strong future are looking a bit limited!

With the poor weather in mind, I thought I'd bring a bit of the Continent into the kitchen and this morning baked Olive and Rosemary bread.

More baking!

I was having a bit of a Domestic Goddess moment yesterday (well, in actions if nothing else!) and as a result, have made another addition to the Jubilee Baking Project.

Yum!

As you can see, a little bit has already disappeared so I thought I'd better photograph it before the rest went. Well, you have to test these things, don't you?

In the previous post, I mentioned that an earlier attempt at bread making many years ago resulted in cannonballs, rather than bread rolls and it rather put me off trying again. We don't eat a tonne of bread but we do need it for sandwiches, etc, and it's a little worrying when you read about all the extra ingredients that go into a simple loaf of bread like preservatives and so on. Not having much success with my bread making attempt before, I'd been pondering on investing in a bread maker.

In the meantime, I saw the new(ish) book by Dan Lepard, called 'Short and Sweet'. I have to say I've no previous experience with his recipes and this was the first I'd heard of him. Looking up the reviews though, I found out that he writes a baking column for the Guardian newspaper, and that people were pretty thrilled with his recipes. One of the recipes was for Easy White Bread.

Thanks to some vouchers, I was soon the owner of a copy. This is something in itself. I have plenty of cookbooks and stopped buying them some time ago because there are so many recipes online, and you often only end up making a few out of the book. But this one had such good reviews, I decided to go for it, with the bread recipes a major factor in that decision.

Easy White Bread is the first recipe in the book, and also the first one I've tried out of it. And it worked! Yippee! I made bread! I made edible bread! Thank you, Dan!

I was also playing with the sewing machine yesterday, so I'll update you on that shortly.

Anyone else got this book, and if so, do you have any favourite recipes from it yet?