Veg from the Garden....

As NO-SHOP February continues, last night (as part of the meal) I roasted some veg (all grown by us) - parsnip, pumpkin, celeriac, and garlic, served up with chopped fresh parlsey (also from the garden) and for an added zing, some ver jus, (made last autumn and stored in the freezer), some black pepper, and a few chilli flakes.

I have now used up all my carefully rationed onions, and completed all the meals through to the end of the month.  I will be pleased to go out and buy some carrots, some apples, and some brocoli (and more onions).  I look forward to some fresh, raw, crunch.... ..and menu planning that doesn't involve a cut of pork.  I managed to make our supply of beef mince, turkey meat, and prawns run to a meal or two a week, but my menus have been heavily influenced by left-over ham and cold roast pork, or meals based on dried peas and beans.

It has been a great exercise and I have to say I have not missed one bit the weekly scramble at the supermarket.  And much to my dismay, despite serious efforts, I don't appear to have made much inroad on the stored food.  Apart from the aforesaid shortage of fresh crunch in the diet, and the prospect of a pork based tedium we could potentially carry this on a good while longer.  I suspect I might have been taking far too seriously (and more deeply ingrained than I realized) the 'store cupboard' life-style of my youth; in which we 'went to town' about once a month for shopping,  spent days/weeks freezing or preserving excess, and lived off our own meat, eggs, and vegetables to a very great extent.

Perhaps I should feel more confident that I have secured our survival and change my shopping habits in future - buy less but buy better.

Gooseberry Semolina Souffle

 

Recipe from:  http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/15925/gooseberry-semolina-souffl-.aspx

Some of last seasons gooseberries are still in the freezer.  A quick internet search for some inspiration brought up this recipe for a gooseberry pudding.  Thank you 'nch'.

Gooseberry Semolina Souffle

400ml milk

50g butter

100g caster sugar

160g semolina

3 eggs

160g drained gooseberries (reserve juice) - Actually I used frozen ones; it worked.

 

Preheat the oven to 180 C / Gas 4. Grease a small casserole dish.

Boil the milk with butter. Stir in the semolina, beating all the time with a whisk until thickened and there is no more semolina on the bottom of the pan. Remove from the heat.  (I did this over a double boiler - takes longer but no risk of  burning the bottom.)

 

Separate the eggs. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until foamy. Gradually add the semolina mixture and beat everything gently.

 

Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the semolina mixture. Drain the gooseberries but retain the juice. Gently stir in the drained gooseberries. Pour into the casserole dish and smooth over. Bake in the preheated oven for 50-60 minutes until the top is slightly browned.

 

It proved very popular, and would easily serve 8-10.

Rhubarb & Pumpkin Crumble

Tigger and I spent some time at the allotment this weekend.  It was mainly an exercise in turning compost heaps and clearing some drainage ditches, but we did notice that many of the rhubarb plants (and we have MANY) have multiple stems on them. 

It must be time to clear last season's rhubarb from the freezer. Fresh will be available a week or two from now.

I haven't sugared rhubarb for years now, prefering instead to cook it in pies and crumbles with a sliced banana, or some sweet cicely stems. 

Years ago I can remember someone who had worked in a jam factory telling me that cheap jams were often made using pumpkin pulp to bulk out the more expensive berry fruits.  So instead of sugar (and because the 'no shop' means I can't go out and buy bananas), I decided to cut the rhubarb pulp with mashed pumpkin. There are still plenty of last year's pumpkins stored on the dining room windowsill, and one or two had started to develop rot round the flower end so time to use them up - fast.

So there you have it - 50/50 stewed rhubarb and mashed cooked pumpkin, spiced up with some grated fresh (or frozen from fresh) ginger, and topped with a rolled oats crumble topping (see earlier post on crumble topping).
 
It works just fine, colour not as deep red as rhubarb on its own, but tastes excellent.

A Blackberry Pudding

Something to follow boiled ham - blackberries (also from the freezer).  Some ground almonds which have probably passed their 'best before' date were languishing in the cupboard so this seemed ideal.

I made these in individual portions in 1.5 cup ramekins - 8 of them.

Blackberry Puddings

Frozen blackberries - say 2-3 cups and no sugar. 

125 g butter
125 g caster sugar (I used about half that and we didn't miss it)
3 large eggs
50g ground almonds
100g self raising flour

Cream the butter and sugar.  Beat in the eggs one at a time (with a little flour if it starts to curdle).  Fold in the ground almonds and sift in the rest of the flour.

Put the blackberries in a prepared 22cm round tin (or 6 ramekins) and pour the batter over.  Sprinkle with flaked almonds.  Bake at 140 degrees C (fan oven ) for 15-20 minutes.

Boiled Ham - Ver Jus, Cloves, Whisky Mustard, and Lime Marmalade

I suppose I should have blogged a day by day record of the cooking from the larder.  The problem is that with this '2 days at home and 5 days living on the boat in London' lark I do a huge amount of cooking on Saturday and Sunday, and then live off buckets of soup and stew during the week.

We've no shortage of food really, and have freezers to thank for the abundance and variety that we are able to enjoy even without going to the supermarket for a month.  For instance this weekend I boiled a gammon joint that I had purchased very cheaply after Christmas (supermarket had a super cut price deal on them and I bought about 4 of 3-4kg each - made two into gammon steaks and froze the other two whole).

The gammon was simmered gently in ver jus (green grape juice - several gallons of which I was able to make when we had to cut the neighbour's grape vine back off the garage roof last September.  It had been a mast year and I had to think of something to do with about 40kg of unripe grapes.  Result?  Lots of frozen very sour grape juice.)

Anyway the gammon simmered in sour grape juice, a couple of tablespoons of grainy whisky mustard we'd made before Christmas  2012, half a dozen cloves, and half a cup or so of runny lime marmalade - a disaster from about 14 months ago which I am slowly working my way through (see earlier posts on lime marmalade....)

The result was just divine.  After it was cooked, I strained the liquid and thickened it up to make a zingy mustard sauce for the hot ham.

Of course we will be eating cold ham with everything for a week. 

The February NO-SHOP challenge - Eating from the Larder for a Month.

Can I feed us for a month from the food we have in the cupbards, freezer, and fridge?

I have set myself a February challenge.  The garden is still producing a generous quantity of winter vegetables – parsnips, celeriac, kale, cabbages, sprouting broccoli Swiss Chard, leeks, celery, turnips, and assorted mustard and oriental greens.  The garden had also stocked the cupboards with a few kilos of dried peas, beans, and tomatoes, and the freezer still has a supply of green beans, beetroot, ratatouille, blackberries, stewed apples, and plenty of assorted frozen meats.  I have half a dozen pumpkins still ‘sunning’ themselves on  the dining room doorsill, and garlic plaits hanging in the kitchen.

In addition to this bounty there is the usual assortment of baking items (flour, rolled oats, sugar, dried fruits, nuts), and a small supply of butter, cheese and eggs in the fridge.

Plenty of herbs, spices, and essences hang out in small shelves beside the boiler, and I cleared out the dry stores cupboard and found tins of fruit, tomatoes, corn, and tuna, and loads of rice, noodles cornmeal, pasta, couscous, and bulghar wheat. (Unfortunately – for my challenge - we are trying to reduce consumption of ‘beige’ processed carbs.  It just means that I will have to be more creative with everything else.)

My makeshift larder (on top of the cupboards) has jam, chutney, and jars and jars of pickled beetroot.  We still have about 10kg of unsold honey from our bees too.

“So,” I told myself, “I wonder if it is possible to make meals for a month without going food shopping.  February is a short month so it seemed a good candidate and on Saturday morning my project got under way.

Now to complicate this – I am only at home 2 days a week.  5 days a week I live a makeshift life-style on a small yacht (moored close to my work) so as to avoid the drag of commuting.  It does mean however that I really need to plan the meals ahead and make things that are transportable – and easily reheated in the microwave.

This week’s meals are 2 or more repeats and combinations of the following:

Breakfasts are porridge or porridge (and maybe some porridge for a change)….

Lunch and dinner could be:
- portions from the leftovers of a huge chilli con carne which we had for dinner on Saturday night, with roasted celeriac and steamed kale;
- parsnip, roasted garlic, and ginger soup, accompanied by polenta baked with Swiss chard, dried tomatoes and grated cheese
- Succotash, and a salad based on Chinese mustard greens,
- fresh turnips (which I love to eat raw, savouring their crisp winter sweetness)
- a supply of individual steamed puddings from my ‘Easy Steamed Pudding’ recipe.

Mr B has by now discovered the handwritten list of ‘contents’ stuck to the fridge door indicating what I have left behind.  He isn’t compelled to participate in my February challenge and can jolly well buy whatever he wants to feed himself on, but as February is a low point in his financial year (the off-season of his employment) he quite welcomes a fridge stocked with ‘heat and eat’ meals.  He likes eggs more than I do so he has also got some mini ham and veg quiches to add variety to his menus.

What am I going to miss?  Fresh carrots definitely.  I love fresh raw carrots at this time of year.  I cannot grow carrots to save myself so you will not have seen them in the garden list at the start of this spiel.

Onions will run out and that is a real concern.  I use them in everything savoury.  The ones I grew were used up weeks ago, so we have only one bin full (maybe 2 kg) of bought ones between us and very challenging (boring?)  meals…..

What else?  I don’t eat them but I suspect eggs will run out within a week or so, and that will put the cobblers on a few things that have an egg in them as binder – and Mr B’s mini quiches.

Cheese will have to be rationed, but I think I can make 1 kg of that last a month.

What will be left over? 

- Pork.  We put a whole pig in the freezer last Summer and still have several roasting joints left.  We could eat pork every weekend, and cold pork in every possible way during the weeks but the word ‘BORING’ comes quickly to mind.
- Pumpkins and garlic
- Jams, Chutneys, and mustards (there really is jam for England in the larder)
- Beige food (rice, noodles, pasta, in particular)
- Vinegar, olive oil, and honey
- Teabags (I hope.  If teabags run out the challenge is forfeit, we will just have to go to the shops then)..

Weight Loss Season

Blogging has gone on hold because baking and puddings have gone on hold.  This seems to be the season when all weight loss resolves are played out and it seems unkind to introduce a regular supply of cake and biscuits into the lives of those struggling with the battle between determination and desire - and plagued by a sweet tooth.

Instead I have been making vegetable soups, and Morrocan chicken tajines, and trying to find interesting ways to eat salsify, celeriac and parsnips (with which my veg garden abounds this year).

Parsnip patties perhaps - parsnips peeled, steamed and pureed (or mashed it you prefer texture as I do) with some egg to bind it and some salt, pepper and curry powder (or fresh grated ginger), formed into patties and shallow fried in light oil.....

Personally I prefer my parsnips coated in oil then baked in the oven for a nice brown caramelized outer layer over sweet soft parsnipy centre.

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')