Apple Surprise Pudding

Possibly the simplest cooked pudding in my repertoire, the surprise in this pudding is that it starts at the bottom of a brew that looks like gravy and floats to the top while it is cooking.

Today's surprise was in fact that I used bananas instead of apple and it worked just as well.

Apple Surprise Pudding
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
large cup chopped apple (or two sliced bananas for the banana version)
1/2 cup milk

Mix all that and put it in a generous sized greased oven dish.

Mix up sauce: 
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice (or essence)
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups boiling water

Pour this over the dough, sprinkle some cinnamon on top, and bake in a moderate oven for 20-25 minutes.



BEFORE

 

AFTER

Easy Steamed Pudding

There are two things one needs to make steamed pudding - pudding basin, and pot large enough to boil it in.  (Three, if you count the TIME you need to steam the pudding.)

Devotees of steamed puddings might regard this as heresy, but I cut the process short by having a pudding basin which gets heat to the centre of the pudding straight away ...

and a pressure cooker....

...the combined effect of which is to cut steaming time to less than half the recipe time.

Whatever your choice of equipment, here is the easiest steamed pudding recipe I know.  This came from Mum and was possibly the ONLY steamed pudding recipe she used.  You can very easily make you own variations on it.  You make it in the basin you intend to steam the pudding in, and it doesn't seem to be a problem that the basin wasn't greased (because you were using it as a mixing bowl).

Hints on the recipe below:
- for tablespoon read "one of those large spoons that often accompany a cutlery set and are used for serving". 
- Heaped in this case means as much flour as you can get on the spoon. 
- Use any jam you like.  Mum always used raspberry.  Below I used Oregon Grape jam.  It is very black stuff and the uncooked pudding mix becomes a particularly unappetizing shade of grey - which is why there are no pictures of the uncooked pudding mix. (Photo of cooked pudding to follow.)

Easy Steamed Pudding.

Melt together 1 tablespoon each of butter, sugar, and jam
Add 3 heaped TB flour,

1/2 tsp soda dissolved in 1/2 cup milk, and
a handful of dried fruit

Cover and steam 1 and half hours (or 40 minutes in a pressure cooker)

Easy Christmas Cake

I have already posted this recipe along with a slightly more complicated one near the start of this blog.

I made my Christmas cake a bit late this year a couple of weeks ago so I went for the easy recipe. 

Now we are 'feeding' it - a shot glass of brandy every couple of weeks.  It doesn't need it. and never got this treatment when my Mum made it, but then we don't have any youngsters around our Christmas table.
 Easy Christmas Cake


Put 3 lb mixed dried fruit in a pot with

8 oz brown sugar,
8 oz butter,
1 Tb glycerine and
1 cup water.
Boil 10 minutes and leave to cool.

Separate 4 eggs and beat the white and yolk separately. Add the beaten egg components time about with

1 lb flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
2 tsp pMixed Spice

Bake in a lined 9" deep tin in a slow oven (about 130C) for 3.5 hours

 

Post on icing it coming soon.

Cold Tea Fruit Punch

Wrong time of year I know but you might want a no-alcohol punch recipe for the Xmas party.  I needed one for a very large birthday party a couple of years ago and after hours of careful research found and adapted up with this 'cold tea' punch.  The recipe (like so many I adapt) was lost immediately after but I work on the assumption that it shouldn't be beyond the wit of  man  this woman to do again what she has managed to do once already.

Fortunately for those who commented that they had enjoyed that particular combination of flavours, I did eventually find the advertising postcard on which I had written the shopping list for ingredients. So here goes:

Cold Tea Fruit Punch

2.5 litres cold tea & 450 grams sugar  (I added a mint tea teabag to the brew)
2.5 litres grapefruit juice
1 litre pineapple juice
1 litre orange juice
4.5 litres ginger ale
Juice of 12 lemons

Add fruit, mint leaves, ice etc ..... serve in a very large bowl.

In imperial measurements it is something like 1/2 gallon of tea, 1 lb sugar, 1/2 gallon of grapefruit juice, 1/4 gallon each of pineapple and orange juice, 1 gallon of ginger ale and juice of 12 lemons.

No. 50 - Hummingbird Cake

Hummingbird cake was a dessert standard in a place I where worked over 20 years ago.  I looked up Hummingbird Cake on the internet recently and discovered there is loads of variety in the combinations of fruit used, and speculation about the name.  I suspect the name is some sort of nod to the range of tropical fruit that appears in these recipes ...that people (rightly or wrongly) associate hummingbirds and tropics.

This one uses mashed banana and crushed pineapple in the cake mix and sliced kiwifruit with the cream cheese filling between the layers.

Hummingbird Cake

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
3 beaten eggs
1.5 cups oil
2 tsp vanilla
1 x 250 gram tin of crushed pineapple & juice
2 cups mashed banana (about 6 average bananas)

Mix the dry ingredients, beat the eggs and oil together and add them to the dry stuff, add the vanilla and fruit.  Do not beat this mixture, blend is gently by hand until just mixed.

Divide the mix between 3 greased and papered 9" (23cm) round baking tins, and bake 20-25 minutes at 170-180 degrees C.  Cool a few minutes in the tins before turning these out on to racks to cool completely.

Icing and Filling

100 grams soft butter, 200 grams cream cheese, about 12 heaped tablespoons of fine icing sugar - beat all together well, spread 1/3 on each cake, put fine slices of peeled kiwifruit (or mango, or even tinned peaches if you like) on each and then stack them up.

Voila - hummingbird cake.   You might need a fork to eat this cake - it's not one to eat with one hand, wielding your coffee cup in the other, while contemplating the latest office emails.

Plum Sauce

The garlic sauce is good but this is my all time favourite homemade sauce.  In fact this is my all time favourite sauce - sausages, fritters, barbeque, baked potatoes, cheese toasties...

Plum Sauce

3 kg plums (small tart, dark red ones scrumped from trees that hang out of hedgerows are best)
2 large onions
1.5 kg sugar
6 cups malt vinegar
3 cloves garlic
2 Tb salt
1 tsp cayenne
2 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground black pepper

Count the plums so that you know how many stones to extract from the stewed plums before you add the rest of the ingredients.  Either that or laboriously cut all the plums and remove the stones before you start. 

Add all the other ingredients and cook gently for about an hour.  I then whizz it up with the blender to make a nice smooth sauce.  Make sure it is close to boiling when you pour it into hot clean bottles and seal them up.

Let it mature for a couple of months before you use it.  It improves with age (the vinegar and spices mellow together and the flavour goes from raw to rich) so don't be afraid to leave it 6 months before you start to use it.

Recipe Book

This is the recipe book of the 10 year old me.  It has not been retired from service, and over 50% of the baking recipes in it are in my 10 year old handwriting.

 

It is a ring-binder covered in the sort of brown paper my mother used to use to line the Christmas Cake tin - sturdy, very sturdy - and decorated with pictures cut out of birthday cards. 

Mostly they seem to have been from my maternal Grandmother gave me - two pictures top right are actually from recycled vintage ones she had been given for birthdays as a child.  Perhaps I should have taken better care of them, but they have never been off display in that last 40 years or so.  You can possibly tell my maternal grandmother loved roses.  In fact she was well known locally for her roses and had won a trophy rose bowl in a local competition so many times they eventually awarded it to her to keep.

Strangely, despite the internet being a wonderful resource, I still work from recipes scrawled on paper.  I find it so much easier than refering to a computer screen set up in the next room - and quicker too for getting to that favourite recipe.   In recent years I have inserted some of the more worn pages into plastic slip covers

No. 49 - Steamed Loaf Take 2 - Fruit Tea Loaf

Now I have produced a firm (very firm) dense loaf which cuts easily and tidily into slices and can be buttered without falling to pieces and sticking to the butter-loaded knife.

Much better – possibly even too far the other way.    The recipe calls for self-raising flour and the only SR flour I had was wholemeal.  Too much bran.  On review I think that I would recommend 50/50 plain/wholemeal SR flour.

This amount made my three little tins and a 1 lb loaf tin which I baked in a tray of water in the oven.

 

Fruit Tea Loaf

500 g mixed fruit

1.5 cups of strong tea (use more if you are going for the full bran experience of wholemeal flour)
250 g caster sugar

Soak all this together for a few hours (preferably overnight)

1 egg

500 g self-raising flour  (or half/half wholemeal/plain self raising flour)
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp grated nutmeg

Stir the egg into the soaked fruit and sift in the dry ingredients.  Mix well and spoon it into your prepared baking (or steaming) tins.  Steam for 1 hour.

You will need a 2lb loaf tin if you are baking it (1 hour at 170 degrees C – fan oven).  I suggest that you stand the loaf tin in a roasting dish with an inch of so of water in it.

Steamed Loaf Take 1 - Date and Walnut

Comments: Fabulous result but not the one I wanted.  This recipe steamed into a soft, loose, moist, delicious ‘cake’.  Loaf it was not.  It was unslice-able (is that a concept?) and un-butter-able.  Crumbly implies dry, so I hesitate to use crumbly, but it fell to apart too easily to spread butter on the portions.

It would, however, make a fabulous steamed sponge pudding, which has given me an idea to continue this blog (after I reach the 50^th morning tea at work) with a dozen easy steamed puddings – especially as we will be heading into winter.  After that….. well who knows.

Date & Walnut Cake

6 oz chopped dates – soaked for a 2 hours in a cup (250ml) of hot strong tea.

1 tsp B Soda
dash of vanilla
6 oz soft brown sugar
2 oz butter
50 ml oil
1 egg
6 oz self-raising flour
3 oz walnut pieces

Once the dates have soaked and cooled, add the soda, vanilla, oil, and melted butter.

Sift the flour and sugar, add the nuts followed by the beaten egg and the wet date mixture.

You will need a deep tin (or tins) with a lid or a cover of aluminium foil and string, or a pudding bowl.  Grease it really well, fill it half way (to allow for rising) and cover it well.

Steam it for an hour in a deep, covered pot, with a trivet (metal biscuit cutter) or folded tea-towel under the bottom of the tin.  Make sure the water comes about 1/3 way up the tin.  Check the water level and top up if it looks like simmering dry.

I use a 10 litre hi-top pressure cooker for steaming.

Bake in Oven option:  Bake in a loaf tin for 45 mins to an hour at 180 degrees C  (170 degrees C in a fan oven).

Cool it in the tin – or serve immediately with custard if you are treating it as pudding.

Baking Powder Tins

That's a dessertspoon by the way

These are old baking powder tins. They're from the days when such containers were metal (not plastic) and the lids went over the top - not  inside it.  My grandmothers and my mother used to save them to steam a species of fruit loaf.

I’m not sure whether it was the dense loaf itself, the butter, or the novelty of it being round,  but I remember the childish me loving the buttered round slices of loaf with cups of hot tea. 

The tins came to light the other day while I was dredging around for preserving jars (for beetroot) and I mused over them for a while and recalled all the experimenting I did while living on yachts to try and make bread and cakes in a pressure cooker.  I must have been trying to reinvent the wheel because I had clearly forgotten that my pioneering forbears had ‘made do’ without bakers ovens for years and had been sufficiently inventive to create perfectly acceptable cakes and bread using steam.

I don’t have the specific recipe for the loaf that my memory conjures now that I look at the tins (if indeed there was only one), so I am going to experiment with oven bake tea loaf recipes that I do have.  I recall that such loaf recipes were rather plain affairs, very little leavening (soda), no egg, dry, hard, fruit soaked overnight in cold tea, and just a pinch of precious spices – and they came out dense and moist, a bit like slicing cheddar cheese….

Did dried fruit used to be drier?  I recall that dates used to come in blocks like building bricks, and sultanas were hard little nuggets.  Maybe that was just the effect of the extra distance travelled to NZ.  Anyway, soaking fruit used to be essential, but I am worried that soaking the softer, oiled, dry(ish) fruit  that we get nowadays might be overdoing it.

Watch this space…..

Pickled Beetroot - overflow method

My allotment is finally producing such quantities of veg that I can start preserving, pickling, making chutneys and jams, and filling the freezer.  I am also drying peas and beans for winter soups and stews.

My family call this 'bottled beetroot.'  It is relatively straight forward if you have the preserving jars to do it.  

Boil up some scrubbed beetroot.  While it is cooking, put your clean preserving jars on a tray in the oven and heat them up to 100 degrees C and keep them hot.

Prepare pickling brine in the ratio 1 cup malt vinegar, 1 cup sugar, and 2 cups water.  Combine, and bring this to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.  Reduce heat to a slow simmer.  (That is a 500ml jar in the picture.  This quantity of brine fills approx 5-6 of these jars when they are packed with sliced beetroot.)

Separate the seals and put them in a bowl so that you can cover them with boiling water just before you start the actual bottling process. 

Make sure the screw bands (that hold the dome seals on until the jars cool and are sealed) are clean and wiped with a skim of vaseline on the inside.

Once the beetroot is tender put on a pair of heavy washing up gloves, lift each beet out of the hot water with a slotted spoon, squeeze them gently to wipe the skin off, slice them up and pack the slices into a jar.  I do this one jar at a time to keep everything as hot as possible to ensure they seal.

Pour hot brine over the beetroot to completely (completely) fill the jar, put a seal on top and make sure it is properly bedded with nothing between the jar the the rubber edge of the seal, and then tighten down the screw band.  Set it on a board to cool and get on with the next jar. 

Any that don't seal will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks (as will the contents of any jar you open to use later).

If you don't have preserving jars, you might be able to use any decent sized jar which had a lid with one of those pop up centres to show they are sealed.  If you do, make sure the inside of the lid is coated so that it is resistant to the effects of vinegar.

Sorry but beetroot is messy and there is no possible way I can photograph the steps in this process without a second pair of hands - messy but worth it.  My favorite pickled vegetable.

Sarah's Charity Bake Sale

Sarah (of the flapjack recipe) organizes the cake sale stall at an annual local fete to raise money for RNLI.  So I offered to donate some cakes.  After a bit if head-scratching I decided to make a range of vegetable cakes – you have seen them all – beetroot brownie, zucchini bread, parsnip and ginger, and the very first post on this blog – pumpkin and honey loaf.

 

As a result of doing that I have updated a couple of the early posts with photos (see No. 14, and No. 15).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cake sale was magnificent (Sarah’s baking is magnificent), and my strange vegetable cakes did sell. Remarkably, despite the name, slices of the parsnip one sold quite quickly.

 

Garlic & Apple - Doofer Sauce

Fantastic sauce that needs to be kept AT LEAST 6 weeks from making before you try it, but its better after 6 months.  I save a certain brand of beer bottles with those wonderful wire clip tops for this sauce.  Seal it up hot and it keeps indefinitely and just keeps getting better and better.


Apple & Garlic Sauce

750g apples
250g garlic
1.5 litres malt vinegar
3 chillies
piece of fresh ginger
2 Tb cloves
4 tsp salt
4 Tb peppercorns
500g treacle

Coarsely chop the apples (skin and cores included) and separate the garlic cloves without peeling.

Combine all the ingredients except the treacle.  Slowly bring the mixture to the boil and cook gently, uncovered, for 1 hour till apples have pulped and garlic is tender.

Rub the sauce through a strainer, return it to a clean saucepan, add the treacle and boil for a further 5 minutes.  Pour the sauce into hot clean bottles and seal.

Makes about 2 litres.

I hate rubbing this through a sieve; I prefer to squash the garlic with the flat of a large knife and extract all the skin, and core the apples, so that once the sauce is cooked I just whizz it up with a blender (one of those handheld wand ones).

(Doofer - short for 'do for anything')

Corn & Zucchini Fritters

Comfort food. What do you think of when someone says comfort food?  Most of my freinds seem to turn to chocolate in some form.  For me it is baked potato, or these fritters ,with lashings of homemade brown sauce.

 

The garden is producing well at this time of year and I have bucket loads of corn and zucchinis so this was Saturday breakfast - you know those weekend breakfasts when you have time not just to make, but also to enjoy and linger over.

 

Mum used to make these for a quick tea in the days when we ate our main meals in the middle of the day.  In my house they have become breakfast food - and my excuse to eat more homemade sauce.

 

There isn't really a recipe, more a 'combination of prefered ingredients' held together by a basic batter. 

Into these ones went chopped red onion,

cooked corn sliced off the cob,

grated zucchini (courgette if you prefer that name),

some finely diced up bacon ends,

chopped fresh herbs,

freshly ground black pepper

an egg,

1 cup of self-raising flour,

a dollop (say 3 tablespoons) of cooking oil or melted butter, and

enough milk to mix it into a batter that drops (rather than pours) off a big spoon



Shallow fry them over a medium heat.  It is not fashionable to use fat these days, but I prefer to skim some caul-fat over the skillet rather than pour in oil which spits and spatters about, then dollop the batter in.  Turn them over when bubbles start to rise in the top of the uncooked side, and when golden brown both sides serve and enjoy.

 

Next week I'll try to remember to share my brown sauce recipe

 

For those of you living in parts of the world where you can get tins of creamed corn, use that.  It makes them even better.



No 48 - Parsnip Cake

 

Nearing the end of this 50 baking challenge I threw the recipe book aside for this one and scoured around for more recipes for cakes with vegetables in them – parsnips for instance.  It turns out that there are loads of parsnip cake recipes, so I started with this one from http://www.bakingmad.com/recipes/cake-recipes 

You’ll love this website, and my colleagues just raved about this cake.

 

 

 

Parsnip and Ginger Cake with Ginger ButterCream

 

250 grams self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
125 grams golden caster sugar
125 grams light Muscovado sugar
2 stem ginger balls finely chopped
3 large eggs
200 grams finely grated parsnip
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
125 grams butter (melted and cooled slightly)

Preheat the over to 170 degrees C (fan oven), and line and grease 2 x 20cm round baking tins.

The original recipe says to sift the flour, leavening, ground ginger, and sugars and stir in the chopped stem ginger to coat it.  Then mix the eggs, grated parsnip, vanilla, and butter and pour it into the dry ingredients and mix gently.

My own experience is that Muscovado sugar does not sift, so I beat the eggs and Muscovado together before adding the butter and beating again.  I mixed the grated parsnip into the flour and then tipped in the wet mix.  It seemed to work. 

Divide the mix between two tins and bake for 25 minutes.

Let them cool a few minutes in the tins before turning them out.

Sandwich them together and ice the top with ginger butter cream:  150 grams softened butter, 300 grams icing sugar and 3 Tb syrup from the stem ginger.

Decorate the top with chopped crystallized ginger.

 

I have offered to help Sarah G with a couple of cakes for her RNLI fundraiser this weekend, so this is going on the 'to bake' list.  I think I'll double it, cook it in 3 x 23cm tins, and make a triple decker sandwich. 

 

No 47 - Mocha Brownie

Ok - not the most enticing photo but I never claimed to be a photographer - serious defect in my blogging attempts. 

It was however moist, dense, chocolatey and well coffee flavoured (I don't think coffee-ey works as a word or a concept).  I do like coffee-chocolate and so, it seems, do my work colleagues.  (And it is much darker on the inside than it is on top.)

 

Mocha Brownie

6 oz butter
5 oz unsweetened dark chocolate (70%+ cocoa)
2 c sugar
1 Tb coffee (expresso powder or instant coffee powder/granules)
1 tsp vanilla
4 large eggs
1 c flour
3/4 c choc chips

Line a 15" x 10" tin (about 1" deep) with foil (and leave some overhang to use as handles for getting it out of the tin later) and grease it all very well with a tablespoon of butter. 

Then pre-heat your oven to 170-180 degrees C.

Melt the rest of the butter and the chocolate in the microwave (or in a bowl over boiling water).  Whisk in the sugar, the coffee and the vanilla.  Then add the eggs one at a time and whisk well after each egg. 

Toss the choc chips in the flour and then fold both into the liquid mix, stirring until just blended.  Pour it into the prepared tin and cook for 20 minutes; the top will be set and the brownie will have started to shrink away from the sides of the tin.

Leave it to cool for 5 minutes before lifting it out onto a rack to cool.  Cut into small squares when it is cool.

No 46 - Zucchini Bread

A bit of a misnomer because it is not bread - more cake or sweet 'loaf'.  However I harvested the first zucchini of this season on Saturday, so I'm getting in the mindset to be over-run by them (which to be frank would be preferable to last year's impoverished harvest).

I love zucchini in cakes and muffins; lots of lovely moistness without much impact on flavour.

Zucchini Bread

1 cup oil

3 eggs

1 ½  cups sugar (I use light brown sugar)

3 tsp vanilla

2 cups grated zucchini

3 cups plain flour
2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

¾ tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp salt (optional)

1 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds

Pre-heat the oven to 160^o C (325^o F) and prep a large loaf tin (or two small ones).

Beat the first 4 ingredients together until the mixture is thick and fluffy.  Stir in the grated zucchini.  Fold in the sifted dry ingredients, and seeds.

Even it out in your loaf tin and bake for about an hour (until a skewer comes out clean).

 

or try a round one.....

No 45 - Upside Down Citrus Cake

'Birds on Bikes', a group of local women, had their annual tour of the Hayling Art Trail last weekend.  It was followed by a meal and social gathering at the large and very welcoming home of one of the organizers of Birds on Bikes.  The invitation to join them was accepted with delight, and as the main course was to be curry, I had no problem deciding what to make to contribute to deserts; there are still jars of my unset marmalade lurking on my top shelf.... 

So in addition to the Lime Marmalade Cheesecake (see No 36), I made this marmalade cake with oranges and lime marmalade.  (Lime so goes with curry.)  This looks like the sort of thing that could easily weld itself to a baking tin, so I hauled out the silicon bakeware.  

(I hate this stuff, it's rubbish for cooking a Christmas cake in, but for cakes that weld to the tin, this turned out to be just the ticket.)   This is a 23cm cake pan.   If you want a deeper cake use a smaller pan.

Upside Down Citrus & Marmalade Cake

Grease the bottom and sides of the cake pan with a heavy layer of unsalted butter.  Sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of demerrara sugar and arrange thinly sliced oranges in there.

Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C.

Cream 200 grams of unsalted butter & 200 grams of golden caster sugar until it is the colour of french vanila ice-cream.

Beat in 4 large eggs, 1 at a time with lots of beating in between.

Add the zest and juice of an orange and zest off a lemon, and 3 generous tablespoons of lime marmalade.

More beating.

Fold in 200 grams of self-raising flour and 50 grams of ground almonds.

Dollop the mix on top of the arranged orange slices, swipe your spatula round the top a bit to even it out, and bake it for about half an hour (in your pre-heated oven).

When it has cooled a bit, tip it onto the serving plate and dress the top with 3-4 tablespoons of marmlade.  Your marmalade won't be an unset disaster like mine so you might need to warm it up first to make it runny.

Et voila...

....marmalade cake

Sorry about the pink cake-carrying understorey.  That colour combination was just so 'in-your-face' I had to photograph it like that.

And the astute among you will have noticed that the photgraphs are two different cakes - of course they are; one of them had to come to work to count for the blog.

No 44 - Mati's Scones

I have just been back home in NZ, and my niece Mati has taught me how to make scones her way.  I won't say they are fail proof - I managed to fail a batch last Saturday morning (made the mix a bit wet and they were tasty and moist but a bit in the flat side) - but they are certainly easy and once you get the hang of the consistency to achieve before you bake them, they can beome a quick and easy fresh baking response to unexpected visitors, or bored kids on a wet day....

Mati's Scones

400 grams self-raising flour

300ml cream

300ml lemonade

Mix it together.  Tip it onto a well greased baking tray (or baking sheet), pat it into shape and run a knife through it where you want it divided into scones.  Bake 20 minutes of so in an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees C.

If you are wondering about the round baking dish - it happens to be the 'plastic' dish that some of those oven-ready TV dinners come in (you know the peel off the lid and put it in the oven kind).  They make quite good non-stick baking dishes, keeping the wet scone mix in shape; but it did mean we had triangular scones...  They taste just the same.

Sweet chestnut and chocolate biscotti

I have been out in NZ where it is autumn.  Sweet chestnuts were falling from the trees in the park around where my Mum plays croquet.  Eating chestnuts has never been a tradition with any of the Kiwis that I grew up with and it seems that they have over the years simply been swept up by the road sweeper and the bloke who mows the grass under the trees.

In recent years there has been an influx of itinerant workers from the Far East and they have brought with them some wonderful new food attitudes, including eating sweet chestnuts.  So the chestnuts are collected but it remained a mystery to most of the locals what you might do with a chestnut to make it edible.

So here we go.  I scrounged up a bag of them which amounted to about half a kilogram once boiled and shelled (see below), whizzed them to a damp powder in the blender and proceeded to make this recipe

http://en.julskitchen.com/dessert/chestnut-chocolate-cookies
And Juls presents it so much better than I do so follow the link.  Just one word of warning her recipe uses chestnut flour, what I produced was damp chestnut powder - the texture of the end biscotti was superbe but the mix was too damp to begin with and needed extra flour.  I also added pistachios to my mixture.

To shell sweet chestnuts, cut the shell on their rounded side and either bake them in an oven at 180 degrees C for about 20 minutes, or boil them for about 20 minutes, and then keep them hot while you pull both layers of the shells off.  Much easier to do it you can keep them warm.

Drier / Dehydrater / Dried fruit (bananas in this case)

I got a question today about the drier I mentioned in the last post - see here
(that is a bag of dried bananas beside it ...I slice  them longways so they dry quicker)  I never pass up an over-supply of cheap, ripe fruit which has reached the end of its shelf-life.

This one does not have variable temperature and is supposed to be used for fruit and veg only.  Meat should (in theory) be dried at a slightly higher temperature, but I have dried meat and fish in it very successfully - cut into strips and marinated before drying. 

It is a great bit of kit for preparation for some long distance sailing, and has done very good service over the years.  Even fruit leathers are possible - fruit pulp (sweetened with a bit of pureed banana if needed), gets spread out on freezer paper on the trays - takes a little longer but is just as effective.

Banana Curd

Heard of Lemon Curd?  Well this is the banana variety.  My grandmother used to make this.  It is not a long keeping spread - a few weeks (6-8 say) and preferably in the fridge or cold safe.  New Zealanders eat a lot of bananas - so we have a lot of bananas getting over-ripe from time to time too.

Last week I bought 5 kg of bananas for 50p, put most of them in the drier, and reserved the over-ripe and damaged ones for banana bread.   Somewhere in the middle of a thought process a memory fought its way to the surface and I had to go on a quest .... for an old diary that had the 'other' childhood recipes.  And here it is:

Banana Curd

Set up a double-boiler - basin over a pot of boiling water.

In the basin melt together:
2 oz caster sugar
2 oz butter
juice and zest of half a lemon
juice and zest of quarter an orange
1" stick of cinnamon & 3 cloves (ground)

Add 2 beaten eggs and cook stirring for a couple of minutes
Add 10 mashed bananas, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for a further 10-15 minutes.

Pot is up in small pre-warmed jars and cover and seal.  You can eat this straight away so have some freshly made bread handy.