This morning when I left home at 8.15 I had to don some wellies and open up one of our very large umbrellas. Almost two hours later, just as l was getting into the car, l looked towards the Sintra Hills and the sun poked it's nose out from behind the clouds, lighting up the raindrops and the wet road. The photo doesn't do true justice to the sparkling raindrops against the mist shrouded hills of course but l think you get the idea:
A slow and misty kinda morning for taking a long walk - a perfect autumn day, the sun just peeping through with a mixture of bonfire smoke and mist shrouding the Sintra hills.
I was warned about becoming hooked on making bread by hand but never expected to be this bad... I start thinking about which recipe to experiment with as soon as my eyes open in the morning.
I'm still perfecting the tecniques and shaping the bread but the results have astounded me - all I want to do is keep making more!!
Hmmmmmm.... perhaps I was a baker in a previous life?!
Fortunately, my kids have inherited the Portuguese bread-gene of eating bread at anytime of the day or night - and at every meal I might add - otherwise we'd be up to our knees in rolls and loaves of all shapes and sizes!
And fortunately, I'm content with just a taster of warm bread with a smidgen of butter, otherwise my hips would be too large to get through the kitchen door!
We decided to take a two-day road trip which included lots of fun, too much good food and visits to a few interesting places. I highly recommend a visit to the Universidade de Coimbra, especially the Biblioteca Joanina and the Chapel, if you ever find yourself in Coimbra. The countryside and views from the hills are breathtaking (and pretty scary when going round the hairpin bends - our GPS lady kept saying "u-turn ahead"!!) so I took oodles of photos which I managed to whittle down into just three sets (four if you count the photos added to the "Clouds" set.
This was R's and my second visit to Serra de Açor and Piodão, the first time being in June 2007 when we were accompanied by my aunt and uncle. Then, the village was recovering from flash floods which had gushed down the hill damaging roads and washing away everything in its path; it has all been rennovated and we were able to walk down to the river. They have done a marvellous job and it was well worth this visit, even though it is now a bit of a tourist trap. Mind you, this is August, the month when it seems the whole of Portugal takes their annual holiday!
Over the years, we've made several attempts to bake bread using various methods and a couple of bread machines later, I think I've finally nailed it... except I only use the macine to mix the dough, the rest is done by hand. The results are worth the extra effort.
Without going into recipes and methods right now, I'll just include the following taken from Christina Pirello's book "Cooking the Whole Foods Way" on the process of baking bread:
"Bread has always symbolized life to me. Bread baking teaches us about success and failure, perseverance and patience. There is no better feeling than the satisfaction we get as golden crusty loaves, kneaded by our hands, are pulled from the oven.
Baking bread keeps you humble. We all begin with the same simple ingredients - flour, water and leavening. We all perform the same ritual tasks of baking - mixing, kneading, forming, baking to perfection (hopefully). Bread dough is uncompromising and unpredictable. Whether we realize it or not, we must submit to the influences of our environment: heat, cold, drafts, oven temperature.
My mother [...] taught me to bake with personality. Master the basics, she would say, and then create loaves of bread; don't just bake them. Bread making is a symbol that we possess the ability to nourish not only ourselves, but those we love. My mother used to say that you could always tell homemade loaves of bread because they looked as though they were baked by someone who cared."
She sums it up beautifully.
