Nothing But Onions

There's no doubt about it, but bread machines are a great invention. Just throw random ingredients into a metal box, close the lid and wait. Before you know it, you're waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread. All I need now is something to start automatically grinding the coffee beans just as the bread machine beeps to announce that the loaf is ready.

The problem with bread machines is that they only make good bread. They don't make great bread. Anything that comes out of them beats your average shop-bought pre-sliced pap into the ground. Home-made, hand kneaded, oven-baked bread is still better. I'm sure the overall taste must be the same, but the texture is better. Bread machine bread tends to be too marshmallowy or it wants to crumble away into nothing. Leaving it to mature for a day results in a firmer loaf, but also a drier one. It kind of defeats the point of freshly baked bread too.

Trying to slice bread fresh out of a bread machine is rather like wrestling with warm cotton wool. And if you're thinking about straight lines, well just forget it. Melba toast? No way. Perhaps I'll just make some bread rolls...

There's a restaurant we sometimes go to - Los Pintores in Northampton - that has as one of its desserts "Chocolate and Chilli Cheesecake". Now this is just a fairly rich chocolate cheesecake with the addition of little pieces of chopped red chilli. The chillies aren't fiery hot, but they do add rather a tang and the whole thing is rather pleasant. The chillies aren't raw, and are sweet, so I speculated that they may have been candied in some way. A trawl through Google revealed a couple of mentions of restaurants serving dishes containing candied chillies, but not much else.

Well, candied orange peel isn't hard to make, and surely candied chillies can't be that much harder, so I thought I'd give it a go. I went to Waitrose and bought a pack of their Thai Chillies (a mixture of types and colours, mainly Birds Eye and Cayenne, I think).

The process was quite simple - I simply made a sugar syrup in a small saucepan, and simmered the chillies in it for about half an hour. at the end, I took the chillies out and left them to cool.

It wasn't really what I was hoping for - the chillies are still fiery hot (I guess the birds eye weren't really the right choice for this experiment) and the skins are very tough and leathery. I don't think the inside really got candied at all - I suspect the skins of the chillies acted as too much of a barrier to prevent the sugar syrup from soaking in. I'll certainly try it again, but I think next time I'll find some less hot chillies and probably slice them first so that the insides get exposed to the sugar syrup too.

Before Christmas, I bought a Lancashire Hotpot dish from Lakeland.It's a round ceramic casserole dish with steep sloping sides. It's about eight inches tall and ten inches in diameter. I wasn't really sure why you need a special pot for hotpot, but we're a bit short on decent sized casserole dishes and I liked the fact that this one was quite deep.

Whilst it seemed like a good idea at the time, this pot has been sat in the back of the cupboard ever since I bought it, and so I thought today was finally the day to try it out.

Lancashire hotpot is a traditional northern dish, consisting of what is basically a layered casserole. It's traditionally made with mutton chops, but I used neck of lamb cut up into large chunks. At the base of the dish goes a layer of thinly sliced potatoes, followed by alternating layers of carrot and leek and the pieces of lamb, together with thyme and seasoning. The whole thing is then topped with another layer of thinly sliced potato, topped up with stock and dotted with butter. A couple of hours in the oven, covered with foil to stop it drying out, and then a final twenty minutes without the foil to crisp the potatoes. Lancashire hotpot is one of those great dishes of my childhood and the crisp sliced potato that covered the top was the best part.

It's in the oven now, and the smells are already wafting up the stairs. Only another hour to go...

The hotpot is now all but gone. It was delicious - second helpings were demanded all round. The lamb was meltingly tender, and potatoes from the bottom of the dish were just indescribable. They had soaked up the juices from the lamb and partially dissolved into a sticky goo, and they tasted heavenly, and contrasted sharply with the crisp potato topping.

If I was to make any criticism, the carrot was still a little firm. Another fifteen minutes in the oven would do no harm.

We went out for lunch today, to the Thai Dusit in Coventry. Their lunch menu really is a bargain - one course for £3.95 or two for £5.95, and the food is fabulous. I had the Tom Yam soup to start - this fiery, clear broth is definitely a favourite, followed by a beef dish whose name I sadly forget, but it was slices of beef with Thai basil and garlic in a hot, wonderfully tasty sauce.

We keep saying we'll have to go and visit one evening and eat something off the full menu, but we just never seem to get around to it...