The 8th pint, a dead freezer, and cherry & almond crumble

I keep thinking that I've reached a point in my life where I no longer think about Blue being ill very much, and then something happens to make it all come rushing back like a steam train. 

I certainly don't think about it every day any more, and it's not the first thing (nay, the only thing) that I'll talk about any more. Chances are, if I met you for the first time in person, these days, it would take a good few conversations before it actually came out that he'd been ill at all. There was a time when it was literally all I could talk about.

Fortunately, even the 'steam train' moments are becoming less and less frequent, and usually triggered by something other than a panic that he's relapsed - which was what usually used to make me think about it when he first came off his chemo. The lovely nurse who cared for Blue on his first terrible night in hospital - when we really thought he was dying before our eyes - lives in the same village as us. I see her often these days - she has 2 adorable girls now herself, and I can actually talk to her in the street without crying. I have come a long way.

I gave blood earlier in the week. This always reminds me of the bad times, but more so than ever this time, when I realised that I'd donated my 8th pint - equivalent to all the blood transfusions that Blue had during his treatment. I came over a bit funny and had to have an extra long lie down, and a bag of crisps as well as a pack of fruit shortcake biscuits and 2 glasses of the rather lurid lemon squash they hand out before I felt strong enough to wander home.

Fortunately, tea was pretty much already organised - one of our freezers gave up the ghost at the weekend, leading to a frantic reassessment of what we could chuck and what we could redistribute amongst the 2 other smaller freezers that we have, already pretty full. Bear in mind that we didn't have the option of cooking and re-freezing anything: if it couldn't be eaten then or in the next couple of days, or rehoused, it would have to go. Out went the swede soup dated 2010 and various small pots of unidentifiable stuff that had been in there so long the hastily scrawled labels had worn off... It's always slightly embarrassing, being presented so starkly with one's hoarding tendencies, but I've decided to rise above it. On the plus side, we've eaten the lamb shanks, some of the more identifiable soup, and lots of rhubarb. Blood donation evening, there was more identifiable soup and a fish pie. When Blue was ill, I had to cook fresh for him every day, regardless of how tired I was. I'd never have been able to feed him fish pie from the freezer.

More importantly than my inability to throw food away, do you remember all those delicious cherries I scrumped, back in the summer? I was so utterly delighted with the possibilities they presented, that while I was deliberating what to make, they pretty much all got eaten just like that from under my nose.

I managed to salvage some after a marathon stoning session (stoning the cherries - what did you think I meant?) and stashed about 800g away in the freezer for another day.

Well, 'another day' arrived - they were in the freezer that packed up, along with the fish pie and the lamb shanks...

I absolutely couldn't bring myself to chuck them out, despite the fact that they were scrumped as opposed to produced as a labour of love by the Husband in the garden - for start, they'd only been squirreled away for a matter of weeks - unlike the swede soup - and the stoning had taken a good couple of hours of my life, and given me black finger nails for a few days. On the other hand, as scrumped produce, they came lower down the priority rehoming list...

No longer luscious purple but rather duller, with much of the juice leached out of the fruit, although saved in the bowl they had defrosted in, they still tasted good. I thought pie, but couldn't face pastry. And anyway, to make a pastry worthy of my cherries, I needed an egg yolk, and as my chickens have completely given up laying, preferring to moult drastically and unattractively all over the garden, and I was feeling too weak after the blood donation to walk up to the butchers and buy some, I had to think again. I could have made jam but I wanted something lovely for pudding. Crumble was the obvious choice. 

Comforting, homely, and in honour of Blue (who adores cherries and crumble) and all he went through in those dark days of leukaemia, and in recognition of the 8th pint, cherry and almond crumble it had to be. 

Cherry & Almond Crumble

800g frozen cherries, defrosted, along with any juice that has leaked out
1.5tbsp cornflour
50g caster sugar
good pinch of cinammon

100g plain flour
80g porridge oats
40g ground almonds
100g demerara sugar
75g unsalted butter

Put the cherries and juice in a pan.

In a small bowl/cup/ramekin, mix the cornflour with some of the cherry juice, then tip pack in to the pan, along with the sugar and cinammon. Heat gently, stirring, till the juice all thickens up, simmer for a little, then scrape the cherries into your crumble dish and leave to cool.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Make the topping by rubbing together all the ingredients into a rough, crumbley scrummy mess. Try not to eat it as it is - hard as it is to imagine, it WILL taste better baked.

Spread the topping evenly over the cherries then pop in the oven and bake for 20 minutes or so till the fruit is hot and bubbling and the crumble is golden brown.

Cherries and crumble both qualify, I'm sending this to this month's Alphabakes challenge hosted by Ros at More than the Occasional Baker and Caroline at Caroline Makes

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Soup - and the Pumpkin conspiracy

OK it's official, Autumn is here.

Yes, there have been some misty mornings, yes there are apples a-plenty, yes, the spiders are on the march, and we've had the first fire in the log burner, but what has really heralded the arrival of Autumn is the first bowl of pumpkin soup. 

Truth be told, pumpkin soup is something I am a little ambivalent about it. In less forgiving moments, I start to wonder if pumpkin is actually one of the biggest food cons there is. Unlike other squash which can taste sweet, nutty and delicious, pumpkin promises much but doesn't always deliver flavour-wise. For a vegetable that produces quite an unctuous, smooth soup, it can sometimes taste quite thin, and alot of the recipes for pumpkin seems to basically involve using the pumpkin as bulk, flavoured with other things. My preferred treatment of pumpkin when it comes to soup involves ginger and chilli, to the extent that any pumpkin flavour that may or may not be there is pretty much hidden. You see what I mean?

This weekend, I decided to take Nigel Slater's approach, and use smoked paprika.

You should also know that I have a vested interest in finding the best ways of cooking up pumpkin. As a result of a pumpkin growing contest that we held here, with the kids, we now have over 50 pounds of the stuff to work my way through.

Yes, 14, 16 and 21 pounds respectivaly, with another 21 pounder already in the kitchen. I need pumpkin inspiration...

 

Yes, I can chutney, yes I can pie, and I'm going to donate a pumpkin curry for 10 to the Harvest Festival supper (Lucky people. Sadly, I will be otherwise engaged...), but even with those options up my sleeve. I still can't avoid soup.

I have to say that the recipe I used didn't really give me the pumpkin epiphany I was hoping for, but it was OK as pumpkin soups go. However, in a moment of inspiration, I toasted some walnuts with some rosemary sprigs and sea salt, and sprinkled this on top. It was also very tasty with some blue cheese crumbled into it for lunch today. That's the thing about making a vat of pumpkin soup - there's lots left over. Not necessarily something to be completely excited about, but it'll keep you fed for a few days, and it does look quite pleasing.

So here you go then. 

Pumpkin soup (alright as far as pumpkin soup goes)
Serves many

2 red onions
2 large cloves of garlic
2 heaped tsp smoked paprika
1.8kg chopped peeled and deseeded pumpkin flesh
800ml chicken stock
a good handful of walnut halves
a couple of sprigs of rosemary
a good pinch of sea salt

In a very large soup making pan, melt some butter and olive oil and fry the onions and garlic till softening. Add in 1 heaped tsp smoked paprika, stir in and cook for a minute or so. Add the pumpkin and carry on cooking, stirring occasionally, until the pumpkin is looking softened and a little caramelised.

Pour in the stock and bring to the boil, then simmer till the pumpkin is cooked.

While the soup is simmering, heat the oven to 180/200C. Roughly chop the walnut pieces and take the rosemary spikes off the twigs. Give the rosemary a bot of a chop if you can be bothered. Chuck the walnuts, rosemary leaves and salt into a small roasting tin and into the oven for 5-10 minutes, till toasty and aromatic, then set aside to cool down a little while you finish the soup. I used the oven because it was already on for something else. You could do this in a dry frying pan on the stove top too.

Finish the soup by tasting and adding in the 2nd teaspoon of smoked paprika, then blitzing as you like (hand held blender etc). Thin out if necessary using milk (or perhaps some cream) - but bear in mind that if it's thin on flavour, you don't want the soup to be too thin in teture too. Taste and add seasoning if needed.

Serve with the rosemary walnut pieces sprinkled on the top, and some really decent bread.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Beef & Beetroot curry - and the balance of power between garden & kitchen

Pickled Chillies. Some like it VERY hot.

The Husband, as you know, is the grower of vegetables in our house. I am involved in executive decisions at seed buying time, and he gets on with the growing and the harvesting. The Husband does a lot of pickling - this year gherkins and chillies - and chutney making, but the day to day use of vegetables is down to me.

Sometimes, I get it wrong. This is not an untypical conversation:

Him: "Please don't use the shallots like you normally do."

Me: "???"

Him: "Well, just like another oniony thing. Can you use them like shallots?"

Me: "???"

Him: "So, don't just slice them up because you haven't got any onions. Use them in recipes that use SHALLOTS".

Me: "Oh".

You see, I am sure I do appreciate a good shallot when it's needed - whole in a casserole, or in a pot roasted chicken dish that I do sometimes, but I am guilty as charged: I'll be scouring the kitchen to pull together whatever it is I need, and if the recipe calls for onions, but there are only shallots, well, shallots will have to do. 

And then, to add insult to injury, when he actually wants shallots for something, there are none left. 

I am a bad person.

However, after the shallot conversation, I have been slightly more wary of how I utilise the produce from the allotment and the  garden.

Beetroot, for example, has been something that doesn't get much beyond being boiled or roasted and then eaten as part of a "pull it all out of the fridge on to the table and pick out the best bits" weekend lunch. Occasionally, it gets grated raw, or turned into a hummus type thang, but not much more than that. This is how we eat beetroot. 

We have decided to give back the allotment and create more growing room in the garden, and so we're currently making sure we get the last bits of this year's veg before handing it over. This has included some extra beetroot that we weren't counting on. 

With some trepidation, I suggested a curry - I had some braising steak, and I knew that I'd seen a recipe for Beef & Beetroot Curry somewhere before, which has been playing on my mind. I don't normally consult the Husband about the menu, but given the reaction to the shallot (mis)usage, I felt it was only right and proper. After all, I haven't been aware of any beetroot in Rick Stein's recent (fabulous) series on Indian cooking, and a quick persual of the indexes to my Madhur Jaffrey books reveals only a beetroot chutney.

As it turns out, beetroot works quite well in a curry, adding an earthy depth. Unfortunately, it doesn't give you a vivid pink or deep purple plateful (disappointing when you see the curry paste that you make with it), but, if you live with a beetroot hater, you don't really know it's there. I can attest to this, because Pink, who is an avowed hater of beetroot (what was I saying about not having fussy children...) ate this - AND it had a green chilli in - one that escaped the pickling pot... 

Beef & Beetroot Curry

serves 4

200g cooked beetroot (if you buy it, don't get the stuff in vinegar) 
'top thumb joint' piece ginger, chopped 
1 large garlic clove 
1 whole green chilli, seeds and all 
small bunch flat leaf parsley 
3 cardamom pods 
1 tbsp tomato ketchup 
1 tbsp treacle 
1 tbsp ground cumin 
1/2 tbsp ground coriander 
1 tsp fennel seeds
 pinch ground cloves 
fresh ground black pepper
1 tbsp sunflower oil 
500g braising steak cut into big chunks 
1 onion (not shallots), chopped 
1 beef stock cube made up to 250ml stock with boiling water
flaked almonds to sprinkle (toast them if you have time - I forgot)

If like me, you're making this in a slow cooker (and why wouldn't you, marvellous thing that it is), turn the cooker on to low to pre-heat.

Make a paste by blitzing the beetroot, ginger, garlic, chilli, parsley, cardamom, ketchup, treacle cumin, coriander, fennel seeds, cloves and a good grind of black pepper in a food processor.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown the beef in batches, returning them to the slow cooker crock pot once browned.

Once all the beef is in the slow cooker, add the chopped ONION to the pan and fry for a few minutes, then add the paste to the pan and fry for about 5 minutes more, till you've got all the beefy bits scraped up from the pan and it all smells fragrant. Tip in the stock and bring to the boil then tip over the beef, put the lid on the slow cooker and leave for 8 hours or 
overnight.

Serve with rice and poppadums (and, in our case, cauliflower and broad bean curry) with the flaked almonds sprinkled over the top. You could add in some chunks of cooked beetroot at the end as suggested in the original recipe, but we'd eaten all that we left for lunch...

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Banana Milk

My family revolves around food (which is definitely not a bad thing)! My sister lives in Boston and I visit her a lot. Again, not a bad thing! In fact instead of giving each other gifts for holidays and birthdays we give each other an "experience" day. These experience days normally consist of a day filled with surprises, sisterly-bonding, fabulous food and memories. One restaurant we normally go to when I am in Boston is Toro. My sister and I love Toro because the food is great, the atmosphere is fun, the people are enthusiastic (we love the chefs and restaurateurs) and we love small dishes/ tapas because we love to share!

This recipe for banana milk is a drink that I modeled to taste like the banana milk on the brunch menu at Toro in Boston (oh, and now in NYC...you must go it is wonderful). Feeling nostalgic for Boston, my big sis, and Toro I decided to recreate one of my favorite drinks.

Banana milk is so simple and comforting. It would make a fabulous breakfast, snack, dessert or drink. This drink has milk, bananas, cinnamon, vanilla bean and honey. I served the frothy milk over ice (just like how it is served at Toro).

Ingredients: Serves 2-4

1 1/2 cups of milk
2 bananas, cut into pieces
1 small vanilla bean, cut lengthwise and scrapped out using a knife
1/8-1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4-2 tsp. honey

1. Pour all of the ingredients into a blender. Blend together until everything is smooth and incorporated and some of the milk is frothy. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed. Serve over ice and top with a dash of cinnamon.

Happy Eatings

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Teatime Roulette - Mexican Lasagne

My kids are pretty good eaters. It's not fashionable, I know and probably sounds pretty smug, but there we go. It sometimes means that I am less forgiving of the food foibles of other children. On the other hand, when you've got friends for tea, you want to make sure they eat something. It sometimes feels a litte like playing roulette.

I was pretty desperate on Monday night, with extra kids to feed, no plan, and no left over roast dinner to fry up with some noodles and pass off as stir fry. Instead, I had to throw myself on the mercy of the veg patch, the cupboards and the freezer.

We have loads of tomatoes still coming and mostly ripening, and, thanks to the Husband's kidney bean free birthday chilli, several cans of red kidney beans more than will fit in the cupboard. Tortilla wraps in the freezer, and a vague memory of a Nigella recipe in my head.

As it turns out, it wasn't such a bad combination. Minimal fuss, with maximum result: I was fairly sure my kids would eat it, not so sure about their friends, but do you know, they all loved it. With toffee apple squares to finish, it may be a perfect post-school tea. Or may be not. The kids loved it so much there was barely enough left over for the Husband and I...

Bear in mind that you need quite a tight fit dish or tin for layering this up in. I found that a 20cm round cake tin worked well, although I had to raise the sides by lining the tin up with silver foil. You can also make up the sauce and the bean mix separately a little while in advance and then layer up and pop into the oven.






Mexican 'Lasagne'

Serves 4 kids and 2 adults - just.

1 large clove of garlic
1 red onion
1 tsp each of smoked paprika, ground coriander and ground cumin
500g fresh tomatoes (or replace this with a second tin of tomatoes)
1 400g tin chopped tomatoes
2 tins red kidney beans
2 small tins of sweetcorn
220g cheddar cheese
pack of 8 tortilla wraps (you'll need 6, so you can have 2 for packed lunches the next day)

If you're making this all at once, put the oven on to heat up to 200C.

Make the tomato sauce: crush the garlic and finely chop the onion. Heat some oil in a pan and gently fry the garlic and onion for 5-10 minutes till soft. While the onions are cooking, remove any woody stalky bits from the tomatoes, then roughly chop up, and set aside.

Add the smoked paprika, coriander and cumin to the onions and cook for another minute, before adding the fresh and tinned tomatoes and 2 cans' worth of water to the pan. Add some salt & pepper, bring to the boil then simmer for 20-30 minutes till the sauce is thickened and smelling delicious.

While the sauce is simmering, rinse the beans and corn, then mix together into a bowl. Grate the cheese, then stir in about 3/4 of it into the beans and save the rest of sprinkling on top.

Get your dish and layer everything up. I put a tortilla in the bottom of the dish, then a layer of beans and spread some sauce over it, and carried on layering, making sure you have a last tortilla and some sauce to spread over the top, then sprinkle the left over cheddar cheese and bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes. 

You could dress this up with guacamole, sour cream and all that jazz, but on Monday, it was fine as it was.
  

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

A Tale of 2 Traybakes - or more things to do with apples.

If you've read this relatively frequently over the last few weeks, you'll have noticed that I'm quite preoccupied with the contents of the veg patch, the apple trees and all the free food that's around this time of year. Not that I'm not grateful, but it happens all at once, and then there's a mad panic to get things harvested and preserved for the colder months to come. I love it, I really do, but sometimes I think I am secretly a squirrel...

The other thing that has happened is that the Husband had to have an operation last Tuesday. It was unscheduled, although not life threatening - I'll let him tell you all about it over a beer sometime - and suffice to say, our pace of life has slowed down considerably. It's been LOVELY.

For example. Instead of whizzing round in 45 minutes flat, I spent nearly 2 hours out with the dog yesterday morning, ostensibly giving him a really good walk, but actually collecting blackberries and generally enjoying all that early autumn has to offer in the way of nature. If you've been paying attention, you'll remember that the dog is too badly behaved to be off the lead when I'm not concentrating on him, so he spent most of the time with a look of quiet indignation on his face, while I scratched and stung myself to blackberry heaven and made a mental note of where the really good sloes are this year.

 

Back home with about 1.5 kilos of blackberries, I wasn't really sure what to do with them because I already had pudding covered for Sunday, and I couldn't face jam, so hit upon the idea of making up bags of blackberry and apple mix to freeze and then whip out at a moment's notice for almost instant crumbles. I didn't make up the whole thing because I don't have enough dishes to consign too many to the freezer, so I used my usual crumble dish, filled it up with sliced apple and blackerries, a sprinkle of sugar, and then bagged it up accordingly. My dish takes 500g sliced apple, 250g blackberries and 40g demerara if you're interested.  I tossed the apple slices in lemon juice too, to stop them going brown. You can freeze crumble topping too, but I didn't go that far yesterday.

The other thing I did this weekend is have the opportunity for a really good cook up - fish pies (Friday night's dinner and also 2 in the freezer), a lovely casserole for supper using up some celeriac from the allotment, and not one, but 2 tray bakes to take some of the apples off my hands. Both were from the Good Food website, and both are worth a share, although one more so than the other. 

It's also a been a good exercise in what they think the cake should look like as opposed to what it turmed out like...

So first up is Toffee Apple Squares.  These are calorific and delicious, but I think probably take rather more effort than they have to. I say this mostly because you could manage the topping with a can of caramel rather than boiling up the condensed milk with sugar and butter (and also because I wasn't concentrating and burnt the sugar the sugar in my pan caught and added a rather interesting - but not entirely unpleasant -  'cinder' flavour to mine...). Also, I think the quantity of sauce is probably far too much. I mean, I have a pretty sweet tooth, but I used about half the resultant fudgy caramel sauce (we ate the rest on ice cream - mmm) and it was just right. 

I also signficantly reduced the amount of nuts in the topping, limiting it to a sprinkle of flaked almonds. A lovely treat, nonetheless.

The second is this Apple and Date Squares recipe. This is absolutely what you want to make for your kids to take to school and feel smugly virtuous. Apple, dates, oats - and utterly delicious too. It was really quick to make, although my apples took longer to mush down than the recipe suggested, but definitely one to make again. Pink raved about it after school today too - "Mummy I really LOVED the flapjack". 

Bask.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Foraged mushrooms - deadly or delicious?

So I've been back out running. It's surprised me as much as you, believe me. 

After the Great South Run in 2010, I honestly thought I would never run again. I tried a few times, but no. I was completely all out of run.

Then, earlier in the summer, a thought came over me that it might be worth having another try, so I did, and what do you know, I've got my 'run' back. I've been taking it very slowly, but yesterday was a great day - I crossed the 5 mile threshold. I'm unlikely to ever run much further in one go - the 10 mile Great South was too far for someone like me, who, let's face it is built for comfort rather than speed or distance. If I'm honest, I knew it while I was training, but running with a group of friends, I kind of got carried along with it all. Anyway, that's beside the point The point of all this is that at the end of my very slow 5 miles yesterday morning, I came across some mushrooms.



Now the Husband and I have spent more than a little time collecting mushrooms in our life together. We've always been ultra cautious, and up until last year, the usual outcome of such foraging expeditions was that we chucked every single fungus we had collected into the bin, and put it down to experience. You see, mushrooms really is something you can't be too careful about. Get it wrong, and you're talking serious problems, if not actual death.

I had a close encounter with the possibility that wild mushrooms can kill you a few years ago. Until recently, I used to get my haircut by a friend who had a one chair salon in a very smart shed in her back garden. One day, during school holidays, I had no option but to take the kids with me. It was a nice day. I thought they could play in the garden. Nicky had just started cutting - my hair was wet and clipped up in the way that it is, when the kids came bursting in: "We've been eating mushrooms" they proudly exclaimed.

I established that they had been eating mushrooms that had grown up in my hairdresser's grass.

I was seized with a kind of paralysis. I was of course extremely cross that they had eaten mushrooms, and also that this was likely to interrupt a longed for hair appointment (I know, I know - but bear in mind that this was just after Blue had finished his chemo, and I was a lot angrier about EVERYTHING then). I was also very worried, but my anger took over and I sat back down in the chair and said to Nicky that she should carry on cutting my hair and I'd take the kids to the doctors afterwards. 

I sat there for about 3 minutes before exasperation, frustration and everything else consumed me, and I stood up, hair dripping, clipped up and a little bit cut, gown and all, and frogmarched the kids all 2 minutes down the hill to the doctors, where we spent a happy hour establishing that the mushrooms were not toxic and they would be fine. Fortunately, Nicky wasn't expecting her next client for a few more minutes, so I even had time to get back up the hill and finish off the haircut, so it all worked out fine in the end.

I suppose I had always thought we had impressed on the kids how important it was to check with an adult before eating something wild, and this made it clear to me that we hadn't been clear enough, and I suppose it's something that I'd like to pass on.

(Also, if you're in the Chester area, Nicky's just moved and is open for business up there. I'd thoroughly recommend her!)

Near misses aside, last year,  we seemed to cross some kind of mushroom identification rubicon - well the Husband did. Thanks  to the River Cottage Mushroom Handbook, a Field Guide to Mushrooms and a website called foragingguide.com, last year, he bagged a fantastic haul of edible mushroms which made some very delicious soup. Just to stress how careful we are about this, he does use at least 2 books to identify his finds. It really is something not to be blase about - after all, I'd rather not suffer agonising kidney failure and death, and I'm sure you'd rather not too.

Anyway, the mushrooms I found looked and smelt like field mushrooms, so I took one home and the Husband thought I was probably right, so we went off with the kids and foraged away.

A basket or so later - probably about 1.5 kilos worth, mainly field mushrooms and a few puff balls, we decided to head back. It looks like it's going to be a bumper mushroom year, and there are certainly loads of promising fairy ring marks around the fields, so we decided there would probably more to gather over the next few days.

Just in case you're wondering, he then checked each mushroom individually. I'm not going to even start to give you advice here about how to check them - you need to consult the experts - but having put aside 500g worth for soup, we decided that the decent thing to do was mushrooms on toast for lunch.

Mushrooms on toast is such a simple and yet totally delicious meal, especially with beautifully fresh mushrooms - but if you can't forage for them, try and get them as fresh as possible from the shops. 

Heat some butter and oil in a pan - you want to get it good and hot so the mushrooms fry and don't boil in the juice they release. Try and resist the temptation to cook them all at once - again you want to make sure they fry. A crushed clove of garlic, a sprinkle of thyme leaves and some reasonably decent bread, toasted how you like it is all you need. Believe me, this is not the moment for some pappy sliced loaf.




Pile the mushrooms up on your chosen toast (butter it first if you're feeling extra decadent), grind over some salt and pepper, and consume. 

Enjoy - and then try not to spend the next few days worrying about whether you're going to die a horrible and painful death...

The thyme really brought out the flavours of the mushrooms, so I'm linking up to Cooking with Herbs hosted by Karen on Lavender and Lovage 

reade more... Résuméabuiyad