The Circus Animal's Dessert

Basic Wholemeal Bread

2009-12-02T16:05:00.001Z

Sinéad has pronounced this bread perfect, so I thought it might be worth sharing the recipe.

Ingredients

400 g plain flour
350 g coarse wholemeal flour (spelt flour works fine too, but gives a slightly nuttier flavour)
50 g milled seeds (whatever you have to hand; flax, pumpkin, that sort of thing)
2 x 7 g sachets of dried yeast
2 tsp caster sugar
2 tsp salt
1 generous slug of olive oil
425 ml water

Method

Dissolve the caster sugar in 100 ml of just boiled water, then top up to 425 ml with cold water. It should now feel luke warm. It needs to be warm enough to activate the yeast, but not so hot that it kills it.
Stir the yeast into the solution. I have read that a non-metal spoon should be used, but I haven't been able to demonstrate any benefits experimentally.
Leave to stand for about ten minutes, or until the yeast is nice and frothy. (It will have been feeding on the sugar solution and emitting carbon dioxide.)
Add the flour, seeds and salt to the mixing bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment (we use a Kenwood Chef).
Mix the dry ingredients around a little with the dough hook. I used to sift the plain flour, but don't bother any more and the bread is none the worse for it.
Pour in the yeast mixture and add the slug of olive oil.
Turn the mixer on to its minimum setting.
Watch the mixture as it comes together. After a minute or two, you should see a nice dough forming. It should be just wet enough to wipe any dry flour from the bowl as the dough hook pulls it around. If it leaves a residue of water on the sides or bottom of the bowl, it's too wet; add flour a teaspoon at a time until it looks right.
Let the machine knead the dough for two or three minutes, or until it starts to look elastic.
Cover with some oiled cling film or a damp tea towel and leave to rise for about an hour and a half, or until the dough has doubled in volume.
Knock back the dough by giving it another minute with the dough hook on the lowest setting.
Place the ball of dough on a floured work surface and gently twist it into two more or less equal pieces.
Roll each of these pieces first into a ball, and then into a fat sausage shape about 20 cm long.
Lightly oil two loaf tins and gently rest the sausages of dough on the bottoms. (Stop snickering at the back.)
Cover with the oiled film or tea towel until doubled in volume again.
Pre-heat the oven to 220° C. (Don't ask me what that is in degrees freiheit or whatever the ridiculous American units are called. Get a calculator.)
Bake at 220° C for 10 minutes then take the loaves out of the tins.
Bake for a further 25 minutes at 200° C.
Cool on a wire rack for an hour or so.

Serving suggestions

Very good with cheese, tuna and mayonnaise, chicken and pesto or tapenade.
Also makes nice toast.

Colony Blues

2009-12-02T13:37:00.000Z

[Note: This poem has the distinction of having been rejected by the New Yorker. As slush piles go, that's the one you want to be tossed on.]

This place is unloved, limply clutched
by its distant, senescent sun.
Here we crouched to kindle weather,
invent rain in the breathless dust.

What they wanted were the dull scabs
of ejecta on the scree slopes
of vacant hills, violent once;
some isotope of tedium.

Katya, my youngest, sees the nurse
at school, is noiseless on the stairs,
the porch swing, a cowled bundle of
thin wrists, faint lesions, allergies.

I have warned the Director that
the algae will not tolerate
these nineteen months, this so-called year
of ultraviolet and shade.

I may radio out again,
not make a fuss,
but something here
is having quite unplanned effects.

Messages may be getting lost.

Bird Shadow

2009-10-12T13:24:00.001+01:00

Taking an age
to dredge keys from
silted pockets,
something stilled you

at the car door—
alarm and flight,
the damp smack
of wing, muscle.

It raked the stave
of bony birch,
a glissando
of quick shadow.

Clearing the trees,
it slipped through your
slow gaze, gaily
surpassing you.

Higher than you
thought, it idled
on an apex
of hidden air.

It returned to
ink-spill its ghost
on the blank ground
and snatch it back.

The First Part of Dreaming

2007-10-16T00:52:00.000+01:00

The first part of dreaming
is lying in a way
that tells the body nothing
of where it is in space,
stills it for that lapse into
bluish underthoughts.
You do not remember or
know how it is done.
Yet you dig and scuff the
dunes, the beaches,
with a scapula or a dull heel,
for some unclasping
chestful of cold sovereigns
until the map is
all sweaty isotherms, and
no surrounding sea.

The first part of dreaming
is a heavy sundering.
A wave abandons sand
much as the last did.
These trillion calligraphs of
grit and salt water
will not recur; nor will
you, or she, and
every wrinkle you made
is caressed smooth.
Even a locket left behind
in rain after tennis
is coveted from hawthorns,
its glinting heart
unpicked in feathered quiet,
forgotten by dawn.