Boom. Just like that, more than two years have gone past since I put pen to paper about the culinary adventures in my kitchen. Truth be told, the amount of time I have spent cooking had fallen off at a similar rate to the amount of time I spent writing about cooking.

Slowly but surely, that is beginning to change. The current combination of extra time at home and far-from-guaranteed access to all the ingredients for any given recipe have got me rummaging around in the cupboards like everyone else and wondering what possible bread flour substitutes I haven’t tried yet in my sourdough loaves (fresh sourdough never stopped coming, even in my laziest kitchen days….more on the flour substitutes another day).

As queueing at the supermarket has become the norm and bread flour has become nigh on impossible to get hold of, I was on the lookout for a bread alternative to go with some cheese for lunch. Sadly crackers proved as elusive in our local supermarket as decent bread.

I’d never made crackers before but I figured they were probably pretty rustic – a quick recipe search confirmed my suspicions. Basically flour and water. While I was nearly bereft of bread flour, I did have a bit of a surfeit of plain flour so any recipe that was more tolerant of not-so-strong flour was going to be a winner.

Flour and water sounded a bit dull to me. So there I spotted an opportunity – while not letting food go to waste is ingrained in me, clearing out jars and packets with nano portions left in them is a near-equal but sometimes conflicting passion. I had pickled some quince last autumn (thanks to a good friend who always shares her harvest – re-purposing the Pickled Cherries recipe that I fell in love with a few years ago) but when the last of the quince went in the new year, I couldn’t bring myself to discard the rich, purple, sweet & sour pickling liquid left behind.

I’m the same with jars of sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes and the like – what a crying shame to bin the wonderfully infused oil just because the main-event is finished. (Anyone checking in my fridge might think I have just mistakenly put an ’empty’ jar back …at the time of writing I still have more of the quince liquor to use (tried-and-tested in red wine sauce for duck) as well as chilli-infused oil from some Italian stuffed peppers.)

And so the crackers became sweet & savoury fennel seed crackers. Much more satisfying.

Simple Sweet and Savoury Crackers