They look so complicated, with their elegant crescent shape and proudly airy layers of rich pastry, tightly curled up and falling over one another. Breaking one open sends a shower of buttery flakes everywhere and leaves your fingers satisfyingly greasy.

Surely, this type of baking is the preserve of the professional? Or the French?

But, no!

It is possible!

Croissants – good croissants – can be made at home, even by a Yorkshireman of limited continental patisserie related experience.

First of all, a warning.

Yes, it’s a bit of a faff. There’s a lot to do, and it pays to be precise and meticulous. Everything has to be nicely rolled out, squared up, evenly cut, rested, chilled… It takes some planning, and a lot of time, to say the least, but it’s worth it and it’s not particularly complicated once you get the hang of the processes.

So, what’s in a croissant?

Butter. Lots of butter. There’s dough as well, but it’s mainly butter. A shocking amount of butter, actually…all those who’ve harboured a faint hope that a croissant or two represented a healthy breakfast will discover soon that they were wrong.

All a croissant is is a type of laminated dough…butter is rolled out very thinly between sheets of dough, and folded and folded to multiply the layers to make each leaf ever thinner and lighter. The layers explode apart in the heat of the oven, the butter soaked into the dough. It’s wonderfully simple.

More this way….

This book feels like a rediscovered treasure found once again at the back of a dark attic, loved but forgotten.  Dusted down and spruced up, it suddenly fits again, makes sense again.  You wonder why it was cast aside in the first place, wonder why people stopped loving it.

Recipes From the Spanish Kitchen was first published in 1990, and fell out of print many years ago.

This reprint feels current, it feels vital and alive, and it shows that Butcher’s book was ahead of its time all those years ago, with its focus on quality and regionalism, with heritage and tradition.

Butcher implies early on that defining Spain is a hard task because it’s a country of many variations.  It may be easier to think of Spain, at least in culinary terms, as a loosely formed collective, with each region’s food only bearing a passing resemblance to that of its neighbour.  Nonetheless, there are similarities, as Butcher argues, a deeper underlying thread running through the food of Spain that make it undeniably Spanish.  “Spain stamps its personality, and what a personality it is, ineradicably”.

More….

A while ago, I spent some time in India, travelling around Rajasthan and the north of the country.  We ended up in the town of Jaiselmer, deep in the Rajasthani scrublands, a place that feels like the very edge of the world.

The big tourist thing to do in Jaiselmer is to hire a guide and trek out on camelback into the Thar desert, spending a night camped out under the stars.  At dinner time, our guide squatted down in front of a fire and made chapatis, turning small balls of dough in his fingers until they became flat disks, widening quickly.  He slapped each chapati on a flat stone sat in the edge of the fire, the embers glowing, heating the rock through. The chapatis blistered and burned, scorched and hissed on the rock, blackening and cooking.

They were rough, coarse, uneven breads, served with a simple curry of chickpeas, carrots and tomatoes.  They could well have been the best chapatis I’ve ever had.

These types of unleavened breads are easy to make, once you’ve got the knack.  It’s about technique and routine. That Indian guide had it in the desert, each chapati the same as the last.

More below…

Our eldest son, is starting to enjoy spicy food.

He now demolishes platefuls of tandoori chicken wings, the spicy kind from the Asian supermarket, and has developed a remarkable tolerance for extra-hot peri-peri sauce.

This is all good, and to be expected from a young Bradfordian.  We know a thing or two about spicy food, you see.

The other one, the little one, is showing no such enthusiasm.  Yesterday, she decided that she could no longer tolerate ham. On pushing, she did concede to liking ham when it was hot, but not cold. I mean, seriously, what on earth?

This curry was an attempt to cover all bases.  It tastes Indian, it looks Indian, but its spicing comes from places other than the chilli plant.  What we’ve got here is a fragrant lamb and tomato stew, with distinctly Asian overtones, something that’s mild, accommodating, but still packed with flavour and body.

I love my chilli, but I also enjoyed this.

More below…