Who needs a leaven: Pasta drying fun

Bread is still king, but sometimes you need your flour to take a more sauce friendly form. Thumbing through Giorgio Locatelli (here) the pasta looked so good I had to make some. But how to dry it. A nice cantilevered arrangement of heat rack, wooden spoons and refridgerator worked pretty well.

The basic kit (+ a half dozen eggs). The pasta machine IS essential btw, without it the stuff is just WAY too chunky.

The sliced up pasta, I got so into the process I totally forgot to take pics ahead of this point.

The general idea can be seen here. Wooden spoons used to pick the pasta up from the slicer attachment, then jammed into the bar above the fridge. Leave overnight.

Look how curly the pasta got. A quick tip if you try this though - put a bowl under your rack, or at least make sure you have a cleared worktop, as a fair amount of the pasta snaps and falls as it dries.

magnets + blend

Magnets are on my mind a lot justnow, as I'm looking for time and resource for a few projects that are rattling around in my head. Meantime the odd magnet google is all I get to do. Guess what I found! Pointless but fun, normal service resumes next week.

Delia wholemeal bread bizarre flour heating technique

Randomly surfing for bready inspiration I found old school sensible cooking from Deliaonline.com somehow irresistable. Especially when the intro to one recipe starts "The poet Pam Ayres once said... ". Joy. Her wholemeal loaf has the most bizarre first step ever - warming the flour in the oven. Why not just add hotter water before the yeast is added?

Handy link addition

Resistors, I knew all about them 15 years ago. Shout a stream of colours at me and I'd be shouting it's rating back at you before you'd had time to check your book yourself. Nowadays my brain is too full, too tired, or (more likely) too lazy. I'm also too lazy to pin something on my wall as a quick reference. Well, actually I'm not - I'm just too lazy to actually get around to making one, printing it off and THEN pinning it to the wall.

Thankfully a nice, colourful, reasonably pretty printable calculator just went up at the make blog. The maker has a pretty sweet fluffy blood cell on his blog aswell. Trust me - it's cute.

Link>> (via>>)

Arkatena Bread

Another recipe based on Bread Matters, Arkatena bread is a taste sensation. Dense, but with a 'holey' texture as you can see below, the perfect soup bread.

Inspiration

Not one of my own, but this has sparked a couple of ideas for me so I thought I'd share the link. MAKE blog has a link to a computer chip trivet. Just the thing for me to rest my red hot baking trays on after a hard saturday morning bakeathon.

LED space shiip

The tiniest of tiny builds - a simple LED + battery spaceship. Excellent for pretending tiny aliens are circling your head in a spaceship with one huge headlamp.




LEDs were pennies each from a Hong Kong ebay seller, batteries were the same but from China. Much cooler stamps on the package from China btw.