Cooking the books

I haven’t really been focusing on food as much as I usually do for the last couple of weeks, mainly because it’s marking time. But I (almost) finished my marking on Thursday, so celebrated reaching what I hoped would be the last day by making some sourdough loaves – one white, one rye. It’s a nice process because there’s a bit of mixing, then the dough needs to be left (time to mark an essay), then some stretching and folding which is a good excuse to get up from my desk and move, then leave the dough again, then start the process again with the second loaf. It’s far too easy when there’s a pile of assignments to get through and a deadline to meet to sit at the computer and suddenly realise you haven’t moved for three hours. So doing some baking breaks the day up nicely. And there’s something good to eat at the end!

I’ve been looking for recipes for the beremeal I bought in Kirkwall since I got back from Orkney, and found this one for Birsay biscuits on the Barony Mill website, which is where the beremeal came from. I made them yesterday afternoon, and it’s a pretty simple recipe – it is quite dry, though, and I needed a splash of milk to bring the dough together. I’d started mixing the butter and sugar when I realised I didn’t have any sultanas, so I did a third plain, a third with chopped dried cranberries, and a third with chopped up dark chocolate buttons.

They’re nice biscuits and very easy to make. They don’t spread in the oven which is good, you can fit lots onto a baking tray without worrying that they will come out as one large biscuit. The plain and cranberry ones were nicest – I’m not sure the chocolate worked. Sultanas would have been good, if I’d remembered to check whether I had any.

Yesterday was also ‘first homegrown salad of the year’ day:

A mix of leaves from an ‘oriental leaves’ mix and a quick growing mix. They’re all growing very quickly, apart from the traditional lettuces which seem to be germinated very slowly and patchily. Beans and courgettes have germinated pretty well, so fingers crossed for good crops from them later in the summer.