broth and bread: my two specialties

Homemade broth is easy, therapeutic, and fills the home with delicious smell and taste. Whenever a recipe calls for broth (e.g. risotto, stirfry, chicken-à-la-king, basically anything saucy), it's so much better to use this stuff than the store-bought stock or the dissolvable fluorescent cubes of salt + who-knows-what.

In the Arnhem IKEA, I finally found the pot of my dreams. It holds 8 ½ litres, which means after boiling away and infusing the water with flavour for 8 hours, and draining all the solids, there's still a decent amount of broth left.

If I had a big freezer, I'd freeze large batches at a time - unfortunately, here in ghetto Fantoft, our freezer is used up by all the meat we bought on the ferry, so we'll be having lots of delicious soup over the next few days.

Just throw everything in, and let time work its magic. One secret is not to boil... just bring to a slow simmer at 90°C, which gives the chance to break down different flavours at different temperatures. Another secret is to place the pot off-centre, to create a naturally revolving current.

After 4 hours, halfway there, with intoxicatingly delicious smells emanating from the kitchen...

Then drain the broth through a cloth, et voilà - pure liquid gold infused with unbeatable taste:

~ ~ ~

Home-made bread is also easy and so full of possibilities I'm only beginning to explore. Since bread is so expensive in Norway (€5 for a loaf - although a good one!) I'm reinvigorated to being less intimidated by streamlining a bread-making process on a regular basis.

Inspired by the yeast package, I tried adding pine nuts this time:

To get it crusty, I also tried to steam the oven before baking it at 200 °C, and it worked. Definitely crusty. Maybe a bit too crusty. I'm going to try a bit less steam next time.

To finish off the long day, a well-deserved homy very Austrian dinner: lovely Tafelspitz with organic carrot-apple salad, roasted thyme-potatoes, cremespinat, Apfel-semmel kren, and of course:

good company.