Let's bake some bread

 "We'd better get to the shops to buy some bread before they sell out" said my wife Jacquie, "You remember what happened last winter when it snowed really heavily".

Our family live in the centre of Caistor, a tiny but very pretty little market town, nested into a fold on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds with magnificent views across the Ancholme valley below. Its lofty position with unobscured views of the major conurbation of Great Grimsby with it's 300 ft Dock Tower and further over to Spurn Point in the East, Lincoln Cathedral and the smoke stacks of Gainsborough to the South and West and the twin spires of the Humber Bridge to the north, our home town, perched high on top of the Lincolnshire Wolds always gets the full brunt of the weather, which ever direction it comes from. When it snows in Lincolnshire it always falls on Caistor first and heaviest.

We've lived here for just over 4 years now and if it wasn't for the constant travelling between here and the coastal towns of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes for work, pleasure or entertainment and the fact that I don't drive, I think that we'd probably have settled in Caistor. Anyway, as I was saying, last November, unexpectedly the snow storms came early, thick, fast, and heavy, settling with a vengeance in deep drifts across the main road. There was no way that I could get out of the drive to work and obviously there's not much call for a self-employed gardener when the snow is 3ft deep on the ground so for the next two weeks I used my time perfecting a simple recipe for home-made bread.

We'd been much too late in organising our gruelling trek across the icy Lincolnshire tundra, panic buying had set in by the time we arrived at the shops and all that was left on the shelves was a slightly squashed pack of 6 soft white buns.

" Why don't you buy some yeast and make your own bread", Jacquie suggested.

 It wasn't as far fetched as it might sound. I first made bread many years ago, as a schoolboy in Cleethorpes during a domestic science lesson. Yes, surprisingly boys were allowed to do cookery in the 70's, but none of them, except for me, of course, wanted to take such a soft and girly subject. "You'll be the only boy in a class full of girls Brown do you realise that? You won't be able to stick it y'know, they'll eat you alive", scoffed the woodwork teacher, not yet realising that with my departure he'd lose his least talented and most challenging of pupils. Having just entered my teenage years, I knew where I'd rather be and the choice between studying sawing techniques while learning how to bang home a two inch nail alongside a gaggle of other noisy, smelly, pushing and shoving, testosterone fuelled boys, over-excitedly throwing chunks of wood around the room and my other option of being in a friendly, warm, calm, sweet smelling kitchen, packed to the gunwales with all manner of tastes, colours, shapes and most importantly for me as a fourteen year old boy, girls, lots of girls, yep....there was only one choice.
My first introduction to baking was certainly a pleasant one, I learnt how to bake bread and how to chat to girls, two things which have stood me in good stead all along my journey through life.
A few years later, during my late teens and early twenties, I worked in kitchens all over the country baking far more than my fair share of bread, and chatting up far more than my fair share of girls, but it was during a period of stability, brought on by the love of a good woman, during my early thirties and with a young family to feed that I really started to stretch and grow my baking repertoire. Croissants, pitta bread,sour dough, rye bread, wholemeal buns and pizza bases were hastily dragged from the oven by our hoard of ravenous kids and all because of the price. It was so cheap to make my own bread. At the time, the Tesco value 3lb packets of plain flour were only 12p each. Yes you read that right, only 4p per pound and that was in the 1990's not the 1930's. Baking became not only a fantastically cheap way to feed the family, it also warmed the kitchen and filled the house with the most delicious of smells.

My mistake (and I do seem to make a lot of them with startling regularity) was never writing down any of my recipes. I baked so often, during those halcyon days living on Chichester Rd in Cleethorpes, that I could easily remember all the recipes off by heart. "I mean, they're so simple Jacquie, how on earth could I forget how to make a batch of wholemeal buns". So when the snows began to fall last November and I found myself, in my late forties, with a packet of dried yeast and a bag of flour in front of me, my mind became blanker than the snow laden skies above. I could very easily remember the process involved, but not one jot of any of the recipes needed to make a great loaf of bread, every time. It took a few weeks to get it right, trial and error alone saw me through.

 Try it out for yourself, I've written the recipe at the bottom of this blog so that you can all have a go, you'll not regret it. We've not bought a single loaf of bread from the shops for more than two months now and I generally make two loaves at a time which'll last us for about three days. The only preservative I use in my bread is salt and I can't honestly tell you how long they'll last for in the cupboard, because they've always been eaten long before they've started to go stale, they really are just so tasty.
Anyway, wash down your work surfaces, give your mucky little fingernails a good scrub and put on a clean pinny, you're about to make the nicest bread in the world.

Ingredients                                                     Tools
2lb plain flour                                                  mixing bowl
2oz wholemeal flour                                        2 loaf tins or 2 shallow baking trays
2oz marg                                                        cooling rack
2 dessert spoons salt
2dessert spoons sugar
1 sachet fast action dried yeast
1pt warm water

1  Put all of the dry ingredients into the mixing bowl and rub the margarine into the flour with your fingertips. This should only take a few minutes.

2 Add the water and holding the bowl with one hand, start to mix the contents of your bowl with the other hand. This should only take a minute or so as well.

3 Sprinkle another handful of wholemeal flour onto your work surface, turn out the contents of your mixing bowl and begin to knead your dough. The purpose of kneading ( pushing and pulling your dough with lots of pressure from the 'heel' of your  hand) is to stretch the glutens in the flour and make the bread nice and fluffy.
So, the more pressure that you use to knead your dough, the better the finished product. I generally knead my dough for about 10 minutes, with some loud raucous music for accompaniment which helps me to find a rhythm for the task. After a couple of tracks the dough is ready for putting aside and proving, (leaving in a warm place to allow the yeast to multiply and grow)

4 Cut your dough ball in half and place into greased loaf tins or alternatively work into two round balls and place in the centre of a couple of greased, shallow baking trays.

5 Sprinkle the tops of your loaves with a little more wholemeal flour. This will keep the crusts soft and improve their appearance after baking.

6 Leave in a warm place keeping the loaves covered with a clean tea towel to stop them from drying out for between three and five hours, depending on how warm the room is. Trial and error will help you to gauge the length of time to suit your home.

7 When your loaves are at least double their original size, place in a preheated oven 180 deg C, 350 deg F, Gas mark 4 and bake for 20 minutes.

8 After 20 minutes take a look at your loaves. If your oven is anything like mine, it will cook at a different speed in different parts if the oven, so you might find that you'll need to turn your loaves around to ensure that they cook evenly on all sides.

9 After another 15/20 minutes remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack.

Bon appetite

Phoenix rising

"Hello, is that Mrs Stocks?.....My name is Ernie Brown, my wife tells me that I'm booked in to speak to your ladies group tomorrow afternoon at 2'o'clock, is our meeting still going ahead?......Good, good, is it still at the Town Hall in Grimsby?.....Okay, I'll meet you there at around 1.45pm, if that's alright with you?......I do have one small concern though, what is it you want me to talk to your group about?.....It's just that well, did you know that I'm no longer the Chairman of Grimsby in Bloom?..... ahh, I did wonder whether you'd seen the report in the paper or not. My problem is that I don't think that I should really be talking about that side of my life without their approval, but if you want, I could just talk about myself and some of my plans for the year ahead. How long do you want me to talk for?......Only 20 minutes, that shouldn't be a problem at all Mrs Stocks. In fact, you could easily find yourself having to shut me up if I go on for too long, I do tend to get a little carried away with myself once I get started.....That's great Mrs Stocks, I'll see you tomorrow, 1.45pm, at Great Grimsby Town Hall.......Goodbye for now."

I've done lots of public speaking over the past few years and the thought of standing up and chattering to the Grimsby Ladies Phoenix Group held no fears for me at all, especially as the theme of the talk was to be Ernie Brown. I couldn't fail, it is, after all is said and done, my favourite subject.

I could easily have been described as being maybe a little bit too blase' about my attitude towards the afternoons performance, a fact which became obvious to all, when I arrived in a very muddy and dishevelled state of dress at Great Grimsby Town Hall. My mud splattered overalls and the ingrained dirt covering my finger ends gave the game away, I'd clearly come straight from work. "Would you like to freshen up before we make a start, Mr Brown?...We don't mind waiting while you go and have a wash if you'd like."

"That's very kind of you Mrs Stocks" I replied, taking off my scruffy black beret and showering the Town Hall carpet with pine needles. "I've come straight from working in a garden on Humberston Avenue and as you can see from my clothes, I really need more than a quick wash so, if you truly don't mind my appearance, I'll just leave my muddy boots in the corner and carry on."

I'd brought along with me a good armful of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society's local Heritage Trail booklets of  Cleethorpes and Great Grimsby town centres, which I'd written a couple of years ago. I passed the booklets around the group and explained to the ladies there, that as the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the local Civic Society, I regularly lead guided walks for groups around both towns.

   "That should get them away from the subject of Grimsby in Bloom", I'd said to my wife earlier that morning.   We've been absolutely inundated this last few weeks with questions surrounding our bombshell resignation as Chairman and Secretary of the Gold Award winning Grimsby in Bloom committee. It's not that I don't want to talk about our sudden, unexpected departure, it's just that well, although I still feel quite negative about some aspects of it, I really don't want to be a harbinger of doom and gloom, I don't want to appear to sound negative and I definitely don't want anyone to think that I've been stuffing my face with a bowl full of sour grapes.

"Good afternoon ladies and thank you very much for that wonderful introduction Madam Chairman. I did speak to Mrs. Stocks last night and I asked her then, what she would like me to talk to you about this afternoon. For the last 3 and a half years I've been the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society and you've all got copies of our local Heritage Trail booklets in front of you, so if you'd like me to talk about my work with the Civic Society, I can do that - or maybe, you'd like to hear about my attempt, last year, to become Great Grimsby's Member of Parliament and my relative success, polling nearly a thousand votes, making me one of the highest polling independent candidates in the country.  If you'd like, I could talk to you about my time as Chairman of the Great Grimsby Founders Festival and my journey along Alexandra Dock in a Viking long boat dressed as Grim the fisherman, the founder of Great Grimsby, carrying a shield and a battleaxe and leading a parade of 250 people through the town centre towards St. James Square, where a fierce battle for the crown of England and Denmark took place in front of Grimsby Minster."

I waited for a brief moment, looking around at both the expressions and the body language being displayed by the ladies before me.

"Grimsby in Bloom" they replied, almost in unison.   "Tell us all about Grimsby in Bloom, will it survive now that you've left and why on earth did you both leave so suddenly?"

......................................................................................................................

Get ready to wash down your work surfaces and put on a clean pinny, next week, we'll be baking bread on Ernie's latest Sunday night blog, Trivial Background Noize.

The Royal Connection

I had wrongly assumed, after resigning from my post as Chairman of the gold award winning Grimsby in Bloom committee last week, that life would become a little quieter now. More time I thought, to sit and read. More time perhaps to write down some old thoughts, think up some new ones and most certainly more time to enjoy the solitude that walks hand in hand with my professional life as a self employed gardener in Northern Lincolnshire. But, it seems to have been yet another week of tying up loose ends, tedious committee meetings and flamboyant talks to Ladies Groups, all of which could easily have made their way towards becoming the theme for this weeks Sunday Night blog, but, after receiving an unexpected midweek letter a couple of days ago, I really couldn't write about anything else and when I finally get around to telling you all about it, you'll begin to understand why.


It'll be twenty years in a few weeks time, since I was incarcerated within Her Majesty's Prison, HMP Hull. I'd been attempting to smuggle cannabis into the country when I was caught by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Officers and sentenced to twelve months in jail. "Smuggler had drugs in underpants" ran the headline in the local paper. It was, as you can imagine, a very low point in my life. Her Majesty's prisons are not at all the drink and drug drenched dens of debauchery which the media presents them to be, it was bleak and it was severe.


If ever you find yourself travelling along the main road out of Hull City Centre travelling eastwards towards Spurn Point, but before you reach Curlew Corner on the Salt End peninsular, you'll notice the large and imposing Victorian prison complex on your left hand side, it's 30ft high brick walls topped with razor wire mark the boundary between two entirely separate worlds.


It was built over 140 years ago to punish and contain wrongdoers of a very different age, in a time when the punishments didn't always fit the crimes. As part of my own punishment, I was locked into a small, grey, stinking cell for 23 hours a day, accompanied by two other petty criminals, strangers to me from the East Riding of Yorkshire. We were allowed one shower a week, one hours exercise in the prison yard a day, (if it wasn't raining) and a plastic bucket for a toilet, let me assure you, it was not a holiday camp and there were no easy chairs and television sets for every inmate, even though the very worst of the tabloids like to tell you there are.


There was one barred window, quite high up on the outside wall of our tiny, three man cell, opposite to the heavy steel door which opened every morning to the accompanying call of "C'mon now you lot, slop out time!".The window had obviously been designed with the intention of being just too high up the cell wall for inmates to look out of easily, but if we took it in turns, all three of us could spend a few moments every day, before our legs began to ache, watching real life pass by on the busy road, three floors below. By standing with one foot on the bridge of the bunk bed and the other on the flimsy, prison issue table, with our hands gripping tightly on to the bars on the window which separated us from the normal world outside, we could catch a glimpse at the life that we were missing.


 As you'd imagine, with a Victorian prison, the barred window didn't have the luxury of glass and more than once a flurry of snow flakes carried on a swirling North Easterly blizzard dampened the pillow of my unfortunate disgruntled cell mate on the top bunk. Conversely, that same unforgiving wind which brought with it the snow flakes, also took away with it the unwelcome smells which came from the 3 plastic buckets with their 3 ill-fitting plastic lids, designed more to hide the contents from sight than to contain any of their smells.


I hope that I don't appear to be complaining and moaning about my lot, or anything like that. I done wrong, I knew that then and I know that now. I suppose that, in a small way my recent attempts at voluntary work over the last few years have always been founded on my need for acceptance within society.


 So you can imagine the smile on my face last Wednesday, almost 20 years to the day since I began my punishment within the red brick Victorian walls of Hull Jail, when I opened an unexpected letter from one of Her Majesty's Ambassadors, the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire.


 My wife Jacquie and I, the Lord Lieutenant explained, have had our names put forward to him for doing good work in the area and he wanted to know if we were available on a few dates in mid June/July as Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth II, Queen of England would like to invite us to one of Her Summer Garden Parties held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.


There are times in everyone's life when you feel as though you've reached the bottom. But, one thing I can carry from my own experience is that the dual burdens of regret and remorse are far too heavy a load for any of us to bear for a whole life time, look forward to the future and what you can become. A leopard can change its spots.

New Beginnngs

Hello, my name is Ernie Brown and I'd like to thank you for visiting my first ever computer Blog.


I've been writing a regular, weekly column for local newspapers throughout Lincolnshire for the past 4 years now, but these are destined to be my first tentative steps away from the printed page and into an adventure through the deepest, darkest depths of the Blogosphere.


I'm 48 years old and married with 3 grown up children. Apart from the very barest minimum of pensmanship which was required of me to progress through the ramshackle education system that existed over a quarter of a century ago, I'd never felt the need to write down a single word, except of course for the usual job applications. That was, until the day when I was jolted from my somnolent torpor by our cash-strapped local authority! 


My life took a very different turn on Christmas Eve, 7 years ago, when our local Authority delivered a careless message through our letterbox, warning us of an impending allotment rent rise of a massive 700%. My young family of 5 was going to be badly hit by this rent rise and with my wife's help, we began a campaign to stop it. 


Within a couple of weeks of frantic email writing, I 'd appeared live from Beacon Hill Allotments during BBC 1's The Politics Show, spoken live on You and Yours, on BBC Radio 4 as well as written articles and quotes for loads of other magazines and newspapers throughout the country, we even featured in Gardeners World Magazine. The highpoint for me though, was watching the TV footage of our local rent rises being discussed by Parliament in the main chamber of the House of Commons, live on Sky TV.


 The campaign came to a sudden end. The local council agreed to proceed with the rent rise and we were forced to admit defeat.


 A few of us on Beacon Hill Allotments became worried about our future on the land which we'd been tending for many years. We'd all been working as individuals on a very large, 9 and a half acre site which was only 52% occupied at the time and with tenant numbers that were dwindling fast. The other, derelict and decrepit 48% of the allotment site was in a terrible state, with rubbish and untamed brambles roving wild and free for as far as the eye could see. Not a very attractive proposition for an allotment virgin to be faced with on their inaugural visit. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we gathered together a few like-minded allotmenteers, formed a fully constituted Beacon Hill Allotment and Leisure Gardeners Society and as Vice Chair, I began writing a mountain of press releases and newsletters.


 In December 2006 our family moved house to Caistor, a pretty little market town, nestled into a fold on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds. One day, on a midweek shopping trip to the areas only major supermarket at nearby Market Rasen, I decided to drop into the offices of the Market Rasen Mail, to see if they were interested in printing some of my more focussed, vegetable gardening scribblings. "Can you write me a weekly gardening column starting next week? I'll need the first by Monday!", said the Editor.


For the next year and a half I wrote a weekly, 600 word column, called 'Digging Deep with Ernie Brown'. It was soon being syndicated throughout all of the local Lincolnshire Newsgroup papers from Stamford to Skegness and across to Gainsborough. My column was all about vegetable gardening and even though I only got paid 2p a word, I enjoyed every moment. It was my first paid writing job and I was very proud of it. My intentions were good, 'Digging Deep' did begin as a vegetable gardening column, but I learnt very quickly how to stretch out the facts and embroider the details to make them a little bit  more interesting and, obviously by the same token, allowing me to rake in a few more of those 'golden' 2p's. I was also hoping that in the long run, I could capture the attention of those who weren't all that bothered about getting their hands dirty, but who liked to hear a good yarn. 


It was during those early years at Caistor that I was invited to become the Chair of the Heritage Committee of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society. Within a few weeks, with their full support, my wife and I set up what was soon to become, the Gold Award winning Grimsby in Bloom campaign. Our local paper, the Grimsby Telegraph, whose editor Michelle Lalor was also a member of our 'Bloom' committee, asked if I would write them a regular weekly column about the progress of Grimsby in Bloom, which they could use in their weekly free distribution paper, the Target.


 I would have to do it voluntary of course, it was, after all, a free paper, but it would give me the opportunity to hone my writing skills and would also give me the soapbox from which I could promote Grimsby in Bloom...... to the hilt.


Well, that just about brings you up to date on the journey along my writing pathway. Last week, after writing 130 weekly columns for the Grimsby Telegraph sister paper. All of them containing around 700 words each, spread out over 2 and a half years and amassing over 90,000 words, my wife and I decided to resign from our voluntary posts as Chairman and Secretary of Grimsby in Bloom.


 Consequently , 'Ernies Bloom Blog' made its final appearance last week. A sad, but true fact and one which brings me neatly back around to the beginning of this computer Blog. Y'know, after 4 years of leisurely writing a weekly newspaper column on a Sunday afternoon with my feet up on the sofa, this has all come as a bit of a shock to me. I am without an audience, nobody is listening to me and I have no obvious reason to write down my thoughts, but I still feel compelled to put pen to paper and air my views. Maybe this Blog can grow to become my new outlet, it's worth a try, nothing ventured nothing gained!


Anyway, if you've been reading this Blog in the hope that I might spill the beans and reveal all of the gory details about our sudden resignation from Grimsby in Bloom, one week ago, on New Years Day 1.1.11, then I'm sorry, you'll have been disappointed. My cup is still half full and I can assure you that there's been no spilt milk to cry over. But, we all know that these things will always, always, come out in the wash......... sooner or later. 


If you would like to read any more about Beacon Hill Allotments, Ernie's Bloom Blog or even 'Digging Deep with Ernie Brown', they're all on my website, www.erniebrown.co.uk. 


Or, you could always just keep on tuning in to this Blog site and hear it all, as it happens, straight from the horses mouth! 


Thanks for listening.


Ern x