Breadmachine recipe: French bread

Making homemade fertilizer is the best way to ensure that your plants thrive with organic feed. Here are the top Vinegar Fertilizer Recipes that offer vital plant nutrients.

‘Potato Pete’ was a cartoon character from the WW2 era, whose job was to persuade people to fill up on homegrown potatoes rather than bread made from imported wheat. Potatoes made it into all kinds of recipes during the war, replacing some of the fat in pastry and even turning into dessert. The Ministry of Food published the Potato Pete Recipe Book, which you can read online.

Oca is a very tasty and useful vegetable tuber. It grows well for me in North Wales. It’s good ground cover and polycrops well with taller partners such as tomatoes. Fresh picked and raw, many varieties have a lemony (oxalic acid) taste which goes after exposure to the sun. The cooked taste is sweet. The texture ranges from that of a slightly less crunchy water chestnut to a soft puree which depends on the variety and how much you’ve cooked them.

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

I have resigned from my job, in the hope of a happier life, and the looming period of self-imposed austerity has brought out my Inner Womble

The onion flatbreads I made earlier turned out to be absolutely divine. I said I have been honing my flatbread skills, but to be honest I use the Moro flatbread recipe and it’s a doddle. The hardest thing to remember is to start at least an hour before you want to eat them, as you have to give the dough time to rise.

The ice cream experiments continue, with a spate of frozen yoghurt trials. I have never been a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but something I read online (and a half-empty jar of Nutella) prompted me to give Nutella frozen yoghurt a go!

A bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet, for a loaf that is about 1/4 wholewheat flour.

Another of my dad’s minimalistic (but tasty!) recipes, for a wartime crumble mix that uses breadcrumbs rather than flour.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

Just after Christmas, Jack Monroe posted a recipe for some bread she made to use up some just-out-of-date yoghurt that was sitting in the fridge. It reminded me that we had some homemade yoghurt sitting in the fridge, but when I checked it had already gone to Furry Town. No one wanted yoghurt with all the Christmas treats lying around! Fortunately, I did have some fresh yoghurt to hand, so I experimented with making a breadmachine version of Jack’s recipe. It took me two attempts to get the consistency right, but even the first loaf was lovely (just a little flat).

Given the shortage of onions during WW2, it’s not surprising that there aren’t many wartime recipes in which they play a starring role, but I did manage to find three – all of which required the onions to be parboiled. I’d never boiled an onion before, but we gave it a go, and (to save on fuel!) I boiled six onions at once in order to try all three recipes.