Bread

Tuesday night is Bert’s music night at Les’ house (Thursday is Les’ music night at our house) and Bert will often come home with something edible as Les and Dawn love to cook. Last Tuesday it was half a loaf of fresh-baked bed and a few cubes of the fresh yeast he’d used to bake it. The bread was really delicious.

This fresh yeast had to be tried. The recipe was a farmhouse cob (found on the side of the flour packet.) The yeast was crumbled into warmish milk, added to the dry ingredients, given 20 minutes with the Kenwood and dough hook attachment and left to rise in the bowl for several hours.

Now it was time to turn on the oven. Nothing happened! I checked the fuse box, everything was fine there. Bert checked the fuse in the switch, replaced it, still no joy. Then the phone rang. It was our friend the master engineer asking if he might call round. I was delighted. Great timing, I informed him, our oven just stopped working.

Meanwhile, I headed up to the attic where I found a little mini-oven that had come with the shepherd’s hut. I’d never used it but now was the time to try it out. If it worked, great – and if it didn’t we could feed the bread to the pigs.

The first thing the master engineer said when he entered the house was,

Where’s this oven?

And he was straight at it. Ruled out a few obvious issues and decided it was all going wrong at the back of the oven. There was a burnt-out wire and he had it all safe and sorted in less than ten minutes. I was so pleased and delighted with him that I believe Bert was jealous.

And what of the farmhouse cob in the mini-oven? Baked to perfection and tasted very good. Not quite as good as Les’ loaf but decent enough. I had it for breakfast the next morning, toasted, buttered and spread with homemade marmalade. When Bert got up I mentioned again how great it was that our friend the master engineer had fixed the oven. He said,

Y’know, I would have worked it out eventually and fixed it myself.

And I said,

I know.

.