Before I grab my cooke's knyfe I just have to share this. Enjoy!

Onion Tart

à la Geoffrey Chaucer

225g plain shortcrust pastry

1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped

25g butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

8 onions, finely sliced

Salt and black pepper

2 teaspoons caster sugar

A quarter teaspoon each of grated nutmeg and ground ginger

2 eggs, plus 2 egg yolks

425ml double cream

Large pinch of saffron strands

On a floured board roll pastry that it be thinne,

Caste thereto with thyme and line a deep tinne.

Trimme the edges neat with a cooke's knyfe,

Then bake it blinde at gasse mark fyve.

Melt the butter and oyle in an heavie panne,

Covered wiv a lidde, as knoweth every man.

Then adde onyons in slices fine ywrought,

And caste thereto sugar and salte.

Cover the panne and turn the heat down low,

Stirre every while, else the onyons stick to.

Remove the lidde and seethe for ten minutes mo,

That the sauce reducteth and darke growe.

Strewe thereto nutmeg grated, tho keep some by,

And grounde gyngere, and return to the fyre.

Lightly beat the eggs and zolkes together,

And season wiv both salt and black pepper.

Heat the crème till just warme with saffron rich,

Then adde the eggs for to mix.

Spoon the onyon sauce into the pastry case,

Then pour egg and crème custard into the base.

Bake in the oven for minutes xxv,

Til golden brown our tarte be.

You can find this and, also Virginia Woolfs "Clafoutis Grandmere" and Raymond Chandler's "Lamb with Dill Sauce" here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/reader-i-marinated-it-6267609.html

Hiya.

My Name is Kellianne, Kal for short.  I am an Artisan Baker in the UK.  I trained for 4 years as a Boulanger de Practique in Paris about 13 years ago and have been in love with bread ever since.  I recent;y had a very intense health scare and decided to try and do what I love and make bread for a living!   I am of course a French Style Baker, so no heavy duty kneading or abuse of the dough!  The idea is to incorporate as much air as you can in, so that the wild yeast along with the yeast you add gets to work.  I tend to use a mixture of high gluten bread flours to create a similar blend to the traditional French flour I learnt with (which is, I have discovered, impossible to get imported lol).

I am so interested to learn all about the bread culture in the states.  I must admit I am mesmorised by your bagels, dixie biscuits, pies, puddings and treats ... seems wonderful and exotic to me.

Any way looking forward to becoming 'virtually friendly'  Now I really must go as I am doing this rather than my costing spread sheet for the bakery :-(((((  The not so fun side of the business .

Lots of love from the currently sunny UK, Kal xxxxxxx

A friend shared this with me on Facebook. Anybody have any other great bread comedy?

from: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06092006

If you want a laugh today, check out Bread People. A sample:

Like many internet memes, my second reaction (after laughing) is "Man, someone has way too much time on their hands."  I'm glad they do though, because some of them are hilarious.  "Bun Jovi" and "Joseph Stollen" are my favorite so far.

I am extremely pleased to say that the book I've been reading this week, 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning and a Perfect Crust by William Alexander is a vast improvement over the previous bread-related memoir I reported on. It's possible, even probable, that you need to be at least a little baking obsessed to enjoy it as much as I did but anyone who has baked at all or even those of you who just really appreciate a good, chewy bite of the staff of life should appreciate this chronicle of a year of bread. Alexander, author of the 2007 book on gardening The $64 Tomato in which he told of his quest for the perfect garden, seems to have a problem with obsessions. Fortunately, he's very funny about it.

In 52 Loaves, he decides that he must, absolutely, recreate the perfect flavor, crumb and crunch of a piece of bread he ate some years ago while on vacation. He reasons that if he bakes the same artisan peasant bread every week for a year, he will come to understand it down to its tiniest filament of gluten and thus be able to achieve his goal. Along the way he guides the reader through the mysteries of wheat and flour varieties, the true nature of yeast, explains in plain English the fearful calculus of the Baker's Percentage and allows us to follow him into the subterrenean kitchens of the Paris Ritz. He travels to meet bakers, scientists and like-minded enthusiasts. He even grows, harvests, threshes, winnows and grinds his own crop of wheat. Best of all, he is hilarious as he describes his attempts to make his perfect loaf. In the last section of the book, he convinces the monks at a monastery in Normandy to let him come bake bread in their ancient community. This section is weightier and clearly important to the author. He seems to finally get close to the "why" of his bread obsession.

I highly recommend this book for any novice bakers (and even for people who have more than a few loaves under their belts). I guarantee it will make your own struggles with levain and alveoli easier and much, much funnier.

I was delighted to see the post by DMSNYDER and the link to my Great American Dream Machine piece in which I kind of made a Morton's Cream Pie.  There is another youtube piece which is not about baking but is cooking related.  In it I made a sardine rarebit.  You might enjoy it.  Best regards, Marshall.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pLFZCEc8bU

I think the one thing that has driven me to trying to bake my own bread is calories. Look at it this way: bread is on the "caution" list at the very least, or maybe even the "forbidden" list, calorie-wise. (OH-MY-GOD it's CARBS! It's CALORIES!) But I do love bread, have enjoyed my buttered toast in the morning (a long lost dream) and my mayonnaise-filled tuna or chicken salad sandwiches, or BLTs. . . . it's been a while.

So here's the thing. If you decide that you're going to eat bread it's got to be PERFECT, right? It's got to be WORTH IT, worth all those calories and carbs. So my absolute favorite bread is a thin-chewy-crusted sourdough -- really sour, you understand? -- with an intense sour taste and magnificent open "crumb. . . ." (I know I should know what that means, but "crumb" was never in my vocabulary until I hit this site. It seems like it's the body of the bread, maybe.)

And I made my own sourdough starter, then appealed to folks on various lists and got starter recipes to try, and even got a chunk of San Francisco starter to add to my own growing community of fermenting combinations. . . By golly the thing is alive, it bubbles and perks and smells heavenly. . .

Okay. Loaf number 1 was square and tasted square. (Bread machine loaf.) Loaf number 2 was kneaded in the bread machine and 2nd rise out of the machine and baked in the oven: flat and dense. I had to throw it away. Loaf number 3 same start, but just a bit higher in the baking. Not worth the calories. Loaf 4 I thought holy cow I might be able to do this. . . and I ate the whole thing. OHMYGOD! CARBS & CALORIES. (Well, it did take me a week to consume it, worth every calorie in taste, if not in texture -- still too dense.)

So this weekend I'm stepping back, knowing that I've got this magnificent starter in the fridge, poised for excellence. My process has been to get it out of the fridge on Thursday night, feed it Thursday pm, Friday am and pm, then start working on things Saturday and . . . CREATING INCFREDIBLY YUMMY CARBS AND CALORIES. . . so there it sits and NOW what do I do. Ignore it?? I can't.

What do you other "breadies" do about eating what you make?????????????

Glad to be here, love the posts and yearn for the perfection I've seen here . . . would just love to NOT have it settle on my hips!

Peggy Bjarno

Physics 1021
Bread is Dangerous

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates  were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average North American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 240 degrees Celsius! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:

1. No sale of bread to minors
2. A nationwide "Just Say No To Toast" campaign, complete celebrity TV spots and bumper stickers.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. The establishment of "Bread-free" zones around schools.

http://www.physics.uwo.ca/ugrad/p021/course_information/bread.html