Читать книгу The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater - Страница 86

Fat flakes of snow are pattering against the panes of the kitchen door, each one sticking on the glass for just a second before dissolving. It is cold enough to have frozen the water in the bucket on the back steps. If ever there was a day to bake bread, this is it. No gung-ho excitement here, just a gentle bit of bread making, the feel of warm, soft dough in the hands, the smell of a fresh loaf coming from the oven and always, always the feeling of ‘Why don’t I do this more often?’

I use dried yeast rather than fresh, simply because I can buy it in the local health-food shop. The flour is organic white from a small mill. Rather than a loaf, today I make slipper-shaped flatbreads to eat warm with taramasalata and hummus. I have never made hummus better than the stuff you can buy at the Green Valley, just off the Edgware Road. White-coated counter staff serve it by the big spoonful straight into a shallow plastic tray, then drizzle the parchment-coloured cream with emerald-green olive oil. But proper tarama is almost impossible to find, and shoppers seem to have accepted the bubblegum-pink stuff sold in tubs at the deli as the real thing. It isn’t. It’s crap. As commercially made food (mayonnaise, tomato soup, pesto) goes, it is the furthest from the real thing. Not even the merest shadow. So I draw a deep breath and pay a small fortune for real smoked cod’s roe from the fishmonger’s, a purple-veined, rusty-pink lobe of roe to beat into olive oil, a clove of garlic and perhaps a little bread to eke it out.