Monday's baking day

Of course, since my sourdough starter seems happy to be used approximately every five days, every day can be baking day, and in due course is - but today's Monday, and today I baked. So...

It feels like tempting fate to say this, but the baking routine has become, well, routine - less experimental, easier to fit into the day's schedule, more predictable, altogether less worth documenting. For the record, then, but briefly, the last four batches of bread were:

• a walnut loaf, which was the best-behaved loaf I have made to date - not the best, necessarily, though it was very good, but the most docile, easy to handle, rising on schedule, ready to be baked when I was ready to bake it.


• a rye and oatmeal loaf, dark and chewy, with a deep slash down the centre so that the loaf rose dramatically on eaither side and each slice was ready to cut in half - so that's how you do it! Now I realise how tentative I was being...


• two focaccia loaves, one with chorizo and dried tomatoes, one with potatoes and rosemary. I may have become a little overexcited at the coincidence that the recipe specified white wine, and there was indeed a glassful left over from last night's bottle - the dough was at the stickiest extreme of handlable. More worth noting for future reference was the difference between the chorizo loaf (baked on the top shelf) and the potato loaf (baked on the second shelf, and very much nicer the second time around, after another 10 to 15 minutes in the oven.


• Nonetheless, I probably overreacted this evening: the stick loaves I baked to accompany the mussels (and a bottle of muscadet, because that's the kind of bears we are) were meant to be crunchy (cornmeal: spelt flour: white flour in a proportion of 1:1:1-and-a-bit) but not necessarily that crunchy...

A good life

I feel as if I grew up with Richard Briers. Say his name, and everyone thinks of The Good Life, but a decade earlier I was watching him in Marriage Lines, which I remember as depicting, even in the early 60s, the outdated cliché of marriage which could only exist in situation comedy - but watchable, enjoyable, for the performances of Richard Briers and Prunella Scales. I'd forgotten, until Wikipedia reminded me, about Brothers in Law. The Good Life was an inspired idea, and a wonderful ensemble piece, and it's no wonder that it is remembered.

In the 1980s, Richard Briers formed an alliance with Kenneth Branagh which gave him a number of Shakespearian rôles (I may be the only person who liked A Midwinter's Tale). You could have seen it as a second career, a return, but he'd never really been away. You'd be watching a film or the television and there he'd be (again, Wikipedia points out that he was even a villain in Doctor Who), or you'd recognise his voice in advertisement.

He was always there; and I'm sad to learn that now he isn't. But he's left some good stuff to remember him by.