Pumpkin bread with walnuts and sage

This rich bread made with pumpkin and walnuts is more like a cake. It is very easy to make, ask me for the recipe, if interested.

Why I bake my own bread

started making bread about two years ago. It had been in the pipeline for a while, within my general trend of opting out of processed food, but the tipping point came in May 2014. As we drove down a stretch of the Adriatic between Istria and Montenegro, I noticed that in Croatia it is apparently legally required to display bread ingredients in a visible, readable fashion. Going through long lines of unpronounceable chemical compounds has tripped off the final alarm in my brain. Back in London, I discovered that supermarkets guard such information for their dear lives: from Iceland to Waitrose, none shows what exactly they put in their bread. It took me an arduous, drawn-out email exchange with M&S to get them to reveal what they put in their baguette.

As I started digging around, I found out that the Chorleywood bread process, invented in the UK in 1961 and then spread all over the world, puts speed, bottomline and efficiency ahead of compatibility with how humans digest their food. It turns out that the bastards only let the dough to proof for a few minutes, barely allowing the yeast to break down things that the human stomach is not well equipped to process, such as gluten and various sugars. The latter-day pandemic of  the celiac disease, when people get adverse symptoms from eating bread and pastry, might well be credited to that wondrous innovation introducing the values of capitalist production into your digestive system. 

That's how I got converted into hand-made bread. My two specialties are largely inspired by the wonderful custard-running Gino d'Acampo. Every now and then I diversify and try other recipes, but my two mainstays, week in, week out, still are pagnotta con finocchietto, farmhouse loaf encrusted with fennel seeds, and pagnotta ligure con patate, Ligurian rustic loaf with potatoes and rosemary. I do modify and jazz up the recipes, with quite splendiferous outcomes, so please feel free to contact me, should you fancy a recipe. All pictures here are of my home creations.

Stewed octopus recipe: χταπόδι στιφάδο, jazzed up a tad

Greek recipes are nearly always straightforward, relying on the quality of ingredients to achieve the desired oomph. Even the notoriously difficult to get the knack of avgolemono requires skill rather than any convoluted kitchen gymnastics - and, of course, locally grown organic produce that in Greece is known simply as food. That's, perhaps, why it's so hard to achieve that gobsmacking level of meals so common in Greece when cooking Greek elsewhere.

So I decided to commit a sacrilege and spritz up the good ole octopus stifado with just a couple of very modest innovations. It has proven a major success when I made it for dinner in our vacation house in Lanzarote.

So here are the cooking instructions:

1. Warm up a very generous glug of olive oil in a thick-bottomed pan. Add the spices you are planning to use to infuse the oil with their essential oils. This time I used adobo canario, to pay homage to the host land.

2. Sautee one and a half heads of garlic until golden brown, then add three finely sliced red onions. Sautee until golden brown.

3. Add one gutted, cleaned and chopped up octopus (about 1 kg weight) as well as one and half heads of garlic broken down in cloves but unpeeled. Turn down the heat and stew until tender. Takes about an hour.

4. Add 700-800 g of chopped tomatoes, salt and ground pepper to taste. Stew 10-15 more minutes.

5. Serve with papas arrugadas - potatoes boiled in skin with lots of salt (or even better n sea water) until they get all wrinkly.