lunch al desko #2

The success of the ripe, warm tomato and damp mozzarella pairing continues, unabated.

I baked soda bread and took it to work wrapped, cooling, in a tea towel.  One quarter of the bread is perfect for lunch: salty and wheaty and filling.  I liked this even more than yesterday's lunch with oat cakes.

My soda bread recipe has somehow knocked down to the following:

• 200g wholemeal strong flour
• 120g white strong flour
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• some salt - quite a bit, really; maybe 1 or half a teaspoon of flaked maldon salt
• carton of buttermilk, usually around 280ml

190 degrees and 30 minutes.

I am such a tiresome organiser that I even measure out all the dry ingredients the night before, so that of a morning I just turn on the oven, mix the buttermilk into the dry ingredients (very briefly, not even kneading it) and bung it in the oven while I take a shower or fight with flimsy contact lenses.  It is very telling that putting lenses in my eyes takes more swearing and fight than making a loaf of bread.

lunch al desko

Warm, ripe tomato and cold mozzarella, with only scrunched salt flakes and olive oil for company. Oat cakes alongside.

Then chocolate Guinness cake, a few days old, and therefore more moist and sticky: even better than when it was first baked.

rice is nice

I couldn't be happier with my new rice.

I am being all homey in my new flat and my particular delight is buying in bulk. The opposite of my uncharacteristically Mother Hubbard life of the past year or so. Five litres of fabric conditioner stashed beneath the sink, pasta by the kilogram, family-sized shampoo... and now a 5 kg sack of Jasmine rice!

I delight in the feeling of plenty. Of knowing that if all goes wrong there will always be rice and nam pla at the ready. Most of all, I like dipping a cup in the rice sack; it reminds me of the grain bin from which I used to feed my chickens when I was 17.  To pour rice out of a bag into a cup now seems so very mean and ungenerous an act.

Amazingly, I hadn't even thought about how the rice would taste until last night when I had some salmon to use. It turns out the rice is that gorgeous, fluffy, slightly sticky stuff that doesn't go to mush despite my lackadaisical handling of it. I was genuinely astonished it was so good.

It was one of those days when I could only cope with minimal cooking - and washing up. I thinly sliced a small fennel bulb and dressed it with a tiny dash of virgin olive oil and wine vinegar (no citrus in the pantry: Mother Hubbard). The salmon I lopped into fat chunks and bunged in a milk pan with a little oil and a finely chopped clove of garlic; this cooked gently and slowly, then I chucked in two tbsp sour cream. I know, very odd!   But everything was served with the astonishing rice, on a summer evening, with contentment pervading, and it really couldn't have been nicer.