There’s a school of thought that says the amount of time people spend watching cookery programs is inversely proportional to the time they spend cooking. In other words, the more TV we watch, the less we cook. In a general sense, they probably have a point. But cookery programmes are one of the few genuinely useful and sometimes inspirational hours or half hours I get out of watching the box. They’re better than my other guilty pleasure – Eastenders – in any case.
So I was overjoyed when a cookery student of mine sent me a link to a soda bread recipe that she’d seen Nigel Slater making on BBC of a recent evening, and asked me if we could make bread together. I got over-excited, watched another program called the Lost Art of Bread Making or something, and set up a ludicrously over-ambitious bread workshop in which we made not only the requested soda bread, but also focaccia, pizza, chocolate-twister bread, the list goes on…
But – even better than that – during the very same cookery programme, the Hairy Bikers did a series of recipes about the humble and under-loved cauliflower, and I found myself doubly inspired.
