The Gasman Cometh

Well, as usual a good start :-) The heating decided to have some sort of panic attack yesterday, so I got in touch with the landlord and Lo! there was a British Gas van on my drive when I got home tonight. That's the kind of landlord I like having. So anyway, the upshot is that the system needs a "power flush" or some such (sounds messy, remind me to hide the yarn) and there was something about a mumblemumble heat exchanger mumble and they'll have to come back. It's working again at the moment but I have a promise from them that if it dies they'll prioritise me up the list. So yay for landlord and yay for British Gas :-D and it should fix the radiator in the living room as well which needs cleaning out.

So after all that excitement yesterday and this evening, I have managed to achieve next to nothing. Which is a bugger as Jules is calling round tomorrow and I'm feeding him pizza. Cause I'm such a classy chick and great hostess :-D and I've still not finished unpacking. Oh well, we can eat off our knees in front of the TV as I haven't unearthed the dining table yet. Unless I just open up the Black Pit of Doom (aka the understairs cupboard) and throw everything in there for the night...tempting.

There was a vague point to this post, which is this:



Oh yeah baby. You're going to be homemade garlic bread tomorrow night.

That, boys and girls, is a homemade loaf. Well, homemade with a little help from Panasonic :-) Yes, I bought a breadmaker, and I can honestly say it is awesomesauce. I spotted the SD-257 in CostCo for £99 and succumbed to the temptation. It's the one I wanted but was struggling to justify the expense, but seeing it at that price was too good to say no to (Amazon at the time were doing it about £105, so not a huge saving but I could have it RIGHT NOW!!!)I love it. I really truly love it. I can have yummy, fresh bread whenever I like. The rapid option takes just under 2 hours for a plain white loaf, it comes out perfect (I can't tell any difference between that and the full cycle) and it only takes 5 minutes to throw the ingredients in the bread pan. I haven't tried out all the fancy recipes yet, but I did do a pesto and pine nut loaf which was bloody amazing. The Panasonic is so darn clever, it can make French, Italian, gluten-free and rye breads, it does doughs, including pizza dough, it makes brioche and you can even make cakes with it (you have to mix them yourself though.) As I cannot seem to make a satisfactory bread by hand it's a godsend.

I decided I wanted a breadmaker when I realised something weird was going on with "shop bread". I had a white loaf that didn't go off AT ALL after something like eight days. That's never right. Bread should be a flourishing penicillin culture by then. I made the classic error of looking at the ingredients. I didn't recognise half of them, which gave me pause. Then I looked at the price, about £1.50 for a "quality" loaf, and realised I can buy about 1.5kg of good strong Hovis flour for that. That makes a LOT of bread :-)

So you can expect a few arbitrary bread pictures over the next few months. I might try out a honey and sunflower over the weekend. Or maybe croissants?

~♥~