Marie Cookpad

  I think you would have to be living under a rock in recent weeks not to see all of the highly decorated focaccia loaves on the internet.  Very pretty to look at for sure. I have only just dipped my toes into the world of Sourdough.  I recently mastered making the starter successfully along with a few bakes with the started and the discard. You can see my tutorial on how to make a Sourdough Starter here .      I am ever so pleased as I have finally mastered this skill!  I have also managed to store it and bring it back to life again with great success, and if anything it is even better now than the original one!  Apparently you can keep these things going for years and years.  I watched a program on the television about San Francisco, the birthplace of sourdough and in the original factory they were still using the starter that they had been using since the 1800's!!  Now to me, that's amazing! All of those highly decorated focaccia are...

  The recipe I am sharing with you today is for an Oatmeal Batter Bread and it is one I adapted from Better Homes and Gardens: 365 Comfort Foods, and I will tell you up front, this is a real winner of a recipe!   I have always had a fondness for batter breads.  They are so much easier to make than regular breads. You can make them simply with a mixer and a bowl.   The mixer does all of the hard work of kneading and helps to create a bread that is both light in weight and in texture. Because these breads are not kneaded it is important to beat the initial batter with a mixer until it comes away from the sides of the bowl and appears stringy.   The remainder of the dry ingredients is mixed in by hand with a wooden spoon and it can be a real work out getting it all incorporated, but do persevere!  Its worth the effort!   Since batter breads use less flour than regular breads, they form a batter rather than a dough and it can be a rather sticky batter! ...

  Did you have a job picking local strawberries when you were a teenager?  I am pretty sure that if you lived in a fairly rural location you probably did.  Local strawberry growers depended on teens hungry for extra money back in the day! I did it for a few weeks every summer for a couple of years. It was a back breaking labour spending the day crouched low to the ground and in hot sun.  You picked long and hard for a few dollars a day, but we were grateful for the work. The farmers would actually send a truck to pick you up and take you to the strawberry fields.   I wonder if teens still pick berries for money?   Or do our farmers have to rely on immigrants.  I don't know.  You would have thought all that picking would have soured my taste for berries, but nope.  I adore strawberries above all other berries. I don't think there is a way I could ever not like them, and here in the UK we grow some of the best.   One thing we all real...