A cheeky little number….. Beef Cheeks.

Whenever I go home to the North I always call in at my favourite butcher’s, George Bolam at Sedgefield. It’s from here that I have got the more unusual cuts, like plate of beef or lamb henry, where I get the best belly pork, either in strips or rolled, to make the perfect joint with crackling. I get my favourite beef skirt from there, too – the tastiest and tenderest (if cooked quickly) steak imaginable. He makes his own haggis and black pudding and has the widest variety of sausages imaginable.  He has a bakery there too, a deli, a fish counter and an amazing selection of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Everything I get from George’s is absolutely fresh, generally local and incredibly good value and that is, I suppose, why all of us should support our local butchers rather than just buy meat from supermarkets.

On my last trip home, I called in to stock up on meat to bring back to the city and saw, for the first time on his shelves, cheeks of beef.

These are, as you would imagine, the cheeks of the cows. The price was incredible – 717g of meat for £3.14? I had to buy it and try it.

So, that was frozen and put into the freezer until I had time to think of what to do with it and the time to cook it.

And then I got ill. I could barely move and any cooking that needed me to be alert and available to do things was out of the question. To be fair, I didn’t want to eat either so for days I lived on hot drinks and an occasional slice of toast.

Then one day I realised I had to have more than that – the Bear needed feeding, for one thing. And then I remembered the beef cheeks in the freezer.

Now, a cheek of a cow would get a lot of exercise, I would have thought. All that chewing of the cud must give those cheek muscles a good work out. Cows seem to chew none stop. So a well muscled piece of meat would need long and slow cooking. And the best thing about long and slow cooking is that it requires minimal preparation, even less attention and the opportunity for a nap while it cooks.

The end result is always something succulent and tasty, perfect for anybody…. even an invalid.

That settled it. I summoned up the strength to go to the kitchen and took out the cheeks to defrost. I would cook them the next day.

The next morning, I unwrapped them and looked at them properly. They were much larger than I thought they were going to be.

What a size they were….I have normal human sized hands, you know, it’s not as if I am a miniature person. Each cheek was bigger than my outstretched hand.

That was going to feed four, at least.

As with so many delicious things, the simplest way is often the best way and with slow cooked food that seems to be particularly true.

I dusted them with flour…..

… and then browned them quickly in a splash of oil, in the bottom of a hot casserole.

I poured in some stock, made from granules and hot water and then thought I could perhaps boost the flavour even more……As we seemed to be stockpiling port, I decided to add a good amount of it to make the gravy even more delicious. I don’t know when we were going to get around to drink it all, so it seems a good choice to use it in cooking now and again.

Don’t worry if you haven’t got port, or don’t want to use it. Use all stock instead, or maybe add in some wine, or sherry… it’s your choice. You do need to add something to make the gravy with, so add enough liquid of whatever you fancy to just cover the meat.

I chopped in some carrots and parsnips and put the covered casserole into the oven at 160° C/320 °F for three hours.

The smell was amazing.

As the oven was on anyway, I scrubbed some potatoes, jabbed them with a knife so they wouldn’t burst, rubbed them with oil to make the skin crispy and put them in the oven to bake alongside the cheeks, then I went back to bed.

When I next roused myself, I went upstairs to a beautifully warm kitchen, filled with wonderfully rich and aromatic smells and opened the oven.

The potatoes were perfect and the beef cheeks looked good. More than good, actually.

I got a spoon to stir the vegetables and gravy round and moved a cheek… the spoon went through it.

Remember how big those cheeks were? Well they were still in one piece, it’s not as if it was all in bits and easy to scoop up. People say, when they are talking about tender meat, that you can cut it with a spoon but this was the first time ever that I really could do that.

The spoon sank through the silky soft meat and there, on the bowl of the spoon, was the most delicious looking piece of meat.

And the taste? It was beyond delicious. It was rich and soft, succulent and tasty.

Probably the best beef stew I had ever eaten. In fact, calling it a beef stew seems to be a bit of an insult.

The vegetables had kept their shape in the long, low and slow cooking and were perfectly tender. The funny thing is, I’m not that fond of cooked carrots, especially cooked carrots in what is, to all intents and purposes, a simple stew but these were gorgeous. They still tasted carroty but they also had a deep rich layer of taste from the gravy.  I loved them.

But it was the meat that was the star of the show and now, thinking back as I write this, I long for beef cheeks again. So much so that I’ve just ‘phoned my mother and asked her to go and get me some more and freeze them ready for me to collect on my next trip.

Those two cheeks made enough to feed four or five healthy appetites….and for those weakened by the dreadful colds and flu, well that boosted my appetite and for the first time in days I enjoyed my food.

Simple, so very simple and it cost so little.

If you see beef cheeks, buy them immediately. If you don’t see them, start picketing the butcher to get some for you. You won’t regret it… although you may regret the fact you spend days yearning for beef cheeks when there are none available.

Lovely lamb shanks, tagine style and the Bear’s shopping expedition

I’m a lucky old thing, I know, and meeting the Bear was the best thing that has happened in my entire happy and lucky life. He’s funny and sweet, very clever and tolerant and (and this is a good bit indeed) very helpful about the house.

I had a lot to do and, while I normally do the shopping because I like to choose what I’m going to cook with, I was running out of time to get everything done. The Bear had some spare time and offered to help….

What could go wrong? I had all the meat and vegetables (so there was no problem with choosing the best examples) and all I needed were things for the house and a few food or drink items for the cupboards. It wouldn’t matter whether I picked them up or he did, they’d be the same….

So armed with a specific (very specific) shopping list the Bear set off and I got on with other stuff. We met later in the kitchen and I started to unpack the bags… cleaning stuff? Check. Dishwasher salt and rinse aid? Check. Kitchen rolls? Check. Butter, milk, cheese? Check. Tea and coffee? Check. Wine? Check, check and more check. (We were having friends round) Cordials? No check.

I had wanted a specific kind of cordial – Grape and Melon. They didn’t have any apparently (and there’s no point Googling or asking about other stockists because they have stopped making it now. Shame on you, Robinson’s!) and the Bear had remembered not to deviate from the list and get another flavour. All well and good. We did have other cordials anyway so it didn’t really matter.

I carried on emptying the bags…. and found, in the bottom of one of them, three cartons of prune juice!

Prune juice? Whatever had possessed him to buy prune juice? I don’t like prune juice and I don’t need prune juice. I certainly didn’t need three litres of it.

He started to explain. Quite frankly the reasoning behind it was flawed. They didn’t have the clear and delicate tasting cordial I wanted so when he saw “Buy 3 for the price of 2”  next to the prune juice he thought he would use his initiative and grab us a bargain….

The prune juice went into the larder and there it stayed as a reminder that sometimes initiative is a terrible thing.

I can’t bear waste though and eventually, months later, decided I would have to do something with it. I’d gone into the larder to get a new box of salt out and spotted the prune juice still loitering on the shelf. I was going to be cooking lamb shanks that day and it struck me that if I were to do lamb shanks in, say, a Moroccan tagine style then I might have used prunes in there. What if, I thought, I was to cook the shanks IN the prune juice, instead of adding them as whole fruit, replacing just a simple stock and so making a rich and tasty gravy?

I had two lamb shanks that I was going to cook slowly while we were off doing other things.  I would have used the slow cooker but the two of them were too big for the pot and I decided that I’d just use a casserole instead. As long as you make sure you have enough liquid in there and keep the temperature low then it is safe to leave for a while.

It’s also lovely to come back to a home that smells of deliciously cooking food……

I love lamb shanks for many reasons. Firstly because they don’t cost much at all and secondly,if you leave them to cook slowly and gently they will turn into the most deliciously melting pieces of meat, far tastier and more tender than most expensive cuts and thirdly because I don’t have to do much at all to make it a perfect warming and mouthwatering meal.

Five minutes preparation and then you can walk off and leave them to glug quietly away for as long as you like. A perfect way to cook something while you are out at work or off out shopping at the weekend.

First of all, brown the outsides of the shanks. All it takes is a few minutes in a frying pan with a drop of oil to crisp and brown the skin. Yes, they are going to be cooked for hours and will cook all the way through but if you brown the outside you get a better depth of flavour and they also LOOK better. It’s all very well being delicious… it’s nice to appeal to the eye as well, though.

While the lamb is browning, quickly chop some onion and garlic.

I had the remnants of some tagine paste that I could use to bring in a hint of Moroccan flavouring and some lovely Rose Harissa that would liven things up a bit. I wasn’t making an authentic tagine but I wanted a definite nod in the direction of Morocco. You can get tagine flavourings in most supermarkets now so choose whtever you fancy.

I put a spoonful of each into my casserole dish and stirred it through the chopped onion and garlic.

Carrots were roughly scraped clean and sliced and the browned lamb shanks were put in the pot on top of the vegetables.

I poured a pint of prune juice into a jug – just look at the colour of it! Now while this could never replace a light and fresh tasting cordial as a drink I could see this was going to make a deliciously thick and tasty gravy. With the harissa and tagine paste to spice it it, I had high hopes of this turning out to be a success.

Mixed with some stock granules to add a salty, savoury taste, it was poured over the meat and vegetables.

And then, because I love it and I knew it would be good, a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon powder were put in.

And that was it. The lid was put on and the casserole was put into a slow oven (165 degrees C/350 degrees F) and I went off to do what I needed to do. If I’d used the slow cooker I would have set it on Auto – which means it gets a high start then it turns down to a very low heat. The cast iron casserole would do just as well on a steady low temperature for hours.

After about three or four hours I came back and looked at the shanks…. they smelled delicious anyway.

Rich and dark from the prune juice, steaming and the meat was falling from the bone.

Chopped coriander would give just the right fresh herby taste

Couscous takes maybe three minutes to make – simply measure it out (the packet will tell you the proportions) and add boiling water so the grains fluff up.

You can add herbs and spices to flavour it if you are having plainer food but the gravy from the lamb would be flavourful enough, I thought.

The meat just fell apart…. the prune juice gravy was rich, savoury and spicy with a mellow sweetness. It all soaked into the couscous making each mouthful delicious. Who would have thought mis-judged initiative could produce such a lovely result? Inexpensive cuts of meat, unwanted cartons of juice and a few hours in an oven produced a meal that I would have been proud to serve to guests.

We enjoyed every mouthful.

So, while I can’t advocate the drinking of prune juice…. I can suggest you cook with it. You might just be as pleased as we were with it.

Slow roast shoulder of pork with perfect crackling

The weather is getting worse and, while it is lovely to live in an apartment where three of the walls are windows, it does get gloomy when you are surrounded by rain spattered glass and grey clouds. When that happens, the only thing to do is put the lights on and make everything look cosy and then curl up, knowing that something meaty and tasty is in the oven….. just relaxing while the smell of roasting meat fills the room. It’s a smell that has always reassured me that things are happy and well in the family.

 A smell that was a constant in my childhood and it means home and happiness with loved ones. My wonderful brother and I are very similar in many ways. One of our favourite things is the crispy, fatty bits on a roast joint… all juicy and packed with flavour.

Not everyone likes this of course….The Bear has many good points and I am always glad I married him, but one of his finest points is that he doesn’t like crackling or the fat on a roast. That, of course, is good for me as it means that I don’t have to share. My brother used the same criteria when he got married – my sister in law is absolutely fabulous and we all love her dearly (he made a brilliant choice, marrying her) but again, she hates that sort of thing. Perfect. There’s nothing finer in our eyes that a gorgeous piece of crackling and the two of us have been known to stand in the kitchen at home dividing up the crisp and tasty skin….

Anyway, while I was shopping I’d spotted this marvellous piece of pork. Outdoor reared and free range meant that it was guaranteed to be tasty. The rain was bouncing off the pavements outside and I just knew that roast pork would be the perfect  antidote to the gloomy rain blues.

Pork shoulder is a great cut because it isn’t expensive but, as with most things, treated with care and respect you can produce the most delicious meals. Time is what shoulder needs, time and heat and salt. That’s all.

This was a lovely piece of pork shoulder with a good layer of skin around it, which is just what you need to get perfect crackling.

Pork shoulder needs slow cooking and it will turn into the softest, tenderest piece of meat ever. The rind will crisp up (if you slice at it) into delicious strips of hard, crunchy and tasty crackling.

But the rind is tough and to get through it you need a very sharp knife. Butchers will slice the rind for you and, in fact, most joints come with the skin cut already but I like to get a lot of narrowly spaced slashes so I start by sharpening my favourite filleting knife.

I’ve never yet managed to use a sharpening steel so I use the Chantry knife sharpener which is one of my better kitchen equipment buys. All you have to do is run the knife through the middle a few times and the blade is perfectly sharp, which is something I have never achieved using a steel.

While you are doing all of this, get the oven preheated to 230 degrees C/450 degrees F

There were some slashes in the rind already but I sliced between them, so each strip of rind was about 1 cm wide, if that. Be careful, if you are slashing not to slice into the meat itself – just cut the rind and the fat below.

The next thing is to get some kitchen roll and dry off the rind before rubbing it over with a smear of oil and then some salt.

What you have done is wiped off the water and added some oil to help start the crisping process and salt to drive out extra moisture and add flavour.

I like to use Maldon sea salt as the crystals are large and easy to pack into the slices of rind. Maldon has a great taste as well. When the pork comes out of the oven the rind will have crisped and almost bubbled up with flecks of salt crystals embedded into it to make the crackling taste divine.

By now the oven will be bouncingly hot so get the pork into a roasting tray and put it into the oven for twenty to thirty minutes.

This is a very hot oven and what it does is sear the rind and start making the crackling. If the oven isn’t hot then the rind won’t ever get crispy.

After the first burst of heat you will see, when you peek inside, that the slices are separating and the rind is starting to cook. You just know, when it looks like this after half an hour that it will have the perfect crackling when it is finished!

You can turn the oven down now to a moderate 170 degrees C/340 degrees F and just leave the joint to cook slowly for a two and a half hours……

There now.

Golden, bubbled and crisp. Studded with salt crystals promising that every mouthful will be deliciosuly savoury.

When you get it out of the oven if you rap on the top of the crackling it makes a hollow sound.

The meat is dark and caramelised from the fat dripping over it as it roasts.

The fat layer has almost disappeared in the long slow cook, making the meat juicy and the crackling crisp.

The crackling strips snap easily into bite sized bits…. perfect for nibbling at while you slice the pork……

A wet grey afternoon can be ignored because you are inside, in the warmth with a marvellous meal, just ready to share with your loved ones.

That is Heaven… that is my guilty pleasure and that is one more reason to appreciate the Bear not liking everything I adore!

Red cooked shin of beef

The weather has definitely changed. The winds are getting stronger and I have started to wear a coat to travel to work.

It been raining a lot as well and when I look out of the window of my office at work I can see waves being whipped up on the lake.

Even the ducks, swans, geese and the heron are all in hiding.

You can see the trees are being bent over in the strong winds. The rain is splattering against the window and the skies are getting more grey.

What we need is something warm and sustaining. I want meat… I want tasty meat. I want something to fill me and make me smile.

So I decided upon shin of beef which is a British, inexpensive cut of meat from the front legs of cattle. Just over 500g costs  just over £3. That’s enough to easily feed four people. Shin needs long and slow cooking which transforms it from incredibly tough to  the most melt in the mouth meat ever, with a real depth of flavour.   If this cut isn’t familiar to you, look at the link  which shows you the difference between American and British cuts of beef.

When you look at shin of beef you can see the tendons and the fat running through it. This has to be cooked slowly and the meat becomes transformed into the most tender morsels imagineable. The gravy served with it reduces and becomes intensely rich and flavoursome. It is perfect in a beef stew with dumplings  and that, I have to say, is how I normally cook it.

Except this time I wanted something different. I wanted something with a bit of a zing to it…and I had a fancy for some kind of Chinese flavouring. I have always adored the taste of star anise flavoured sauces and I remembered that when I was a poor student and wanted a treat I would order fried rice with a drizzle of Chinese barbecue rib sauce on it. That would be it. Just rice with some sauce… I think the takeaway was used to poverty stricken students asking for the bare minimum. (Mind you, there was an Italian restaurant in town that once served a group of us a side dish of peas between us because that was all we could afford and one of our friends fancied someone working there…)

Anyway. Here I was, years later, with enough money to actually buy some meat and I was going to make the most of it. I didn’t have a classic Red Cooked Beef recipe but I could make a fair attempt at it. No doubt the purists will think this isn’t the way to do it but this works for us. The flavour at the end is amazing and that’s good all we are concerned with.

Slow cooked meat is the easiest thing in the world. All it needs is time. You really do very little to it.

First of all, sear the outside of the beef as this gives it a good colour and a better taste.

Chop an onion into pieces. There’s no need to worry about making it neat – after a few hours in the slow cooker this will jsut disappear into a lovely rich sauce.

Put the onion in the bottom of the slow cooker (or casserole dish if you are using that) and lay the browned meat on top of it.

Add some oil to the pan juices (yes, I know that using sesame oil might seem extravagant, but once oil is opened you must use it as it will go off. You might as well use it in an appropriate dish rather than waste it. The delicious smell will disappear, I know, but you know the mantra, waste not, want not!) Use vegetable oil if you have it. What you are doing is getting the rich caramelised bits of meat from the pan.

Stir in a good teaspoon of minced ginger, the smae of garlic and half a teaspoon of  chilli – here I am using the tubes of freshly minced herbs and spices a) because I have them and b) my chillies have failed this year and my ginger is dried up and horrid. They are great to keep in the fridge, ready for an emergency. Add a good splash of soy sauce to add a salty, savoury element.

And star anise. Aren’t they beautiful?

Pour the oil and meat juice mix over the meat and onions and add the star anise.

Normally I’d add Chinese rice wine but we had none left… we did have sherry though and that is a good compromise. Half a cup of sherry adds an extra layer of aromatics to the dish.

A cup of water is added to bring the liquid content up to almost the top of the onion and meat. Don’t cover it, though as that will boil it and toughen the meat. You are aiming for a lovely gravy that will cosset the meat until it relaxes into tender submission.

And that’s it. Five minutes to prepare.

All you have to do now is to start the slow cooker, or put your casserole in the oven on a low heat and then just walk away for a few hours. Relax and enjoy the sense of anticipation.

Four hours later, the apartment smells of delicious, fragrant, spicy meat.

The meat is so tender it just falls apart when I lift it out with a spoon. The long, slow cooking has turned the tough meat into soft and delicious morsels.

Served in a bowl on top of some noodles with a few snipped chives over the top of it and we had the perfect supper. Delicious, tasty, spicily aromatic beef piled on top of soft and filling noodles… heaven in a bowl.

It made the grey day go away and we felt warm and happy.

What more could you ask for? A meal that tasted delicious and cost £1 per serving. That’s pretty good going.

Apple Butter

This autumn (and I know it is still late summer really, but it is the 1st September and it was misty when I got up and it is just starting to feel autumnal) well, this autumn the apple crops are amazing. Every apple tree seems to be laden with fruit. Friends who drove up to see us, last weekend,  said the roads from Oxfordshire were being pelted with fruit as they passed. So many apples, and all of them so ripe they just fell from the trees with the faintest encouragement or vibration from passing traffic. I often wonder about the roadside apple trees… are they successful seedlings, all grown up from a thrown away apple core as people went past, or are they the remnants of a long ago cottage garden by the road? I think they are, perhaps, from cores as the trees are so tall and straight. Any old apple tree in a garden tends to be gnarled and battered. It’s nice to think of nature triumphing from a discarded core, isn’t it?

But there’s so many of them! And no one is doing anything with them. What a waste! Mind you, it’s thinking of things to do with this huge crop……

Today’s apples, I decided, were going to be made into apple butter.

I’d read about this for years but not really explored what it was. I had a half notion it was apples and butter (which sound rather nice, actually) but when I started searching, I discovered that it was just apples, spices and a little bit of sugar, boiled down and thickened during the long slow cooking to make a preserved apple spread. It spreads, apparently, like butter when it is done, which is how it got its name. Wikipedia explained a bit more, as did Charles, a friend in America, who told me that his father -in- law and the rest of his townsfolk gather to make apple butter in huge quantities in the town square. The smell is amazing, apparently, spreading out from the town square. Historically the idea came from Europe and was taken to America by immigrants and it is mainly in America that it is made now.

Well, it is going to be made in Nottingham today. I have fruit (plenty of fruit) and time to do it. All it takes is apples and spices. Something that we can have on toast, or cook with later in the year when all the apples have either fallen or rotted. Something healthy and tasty. A dairy free spread from free fruit? Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It is simplicity itself. All you have to do is quarter the apples, leaving the skin on and the core in – this will add pectin to the apples and help it set. Only cut out and damaged bits of apple and do remove any spiders or caterpillars that you may  have brought home with you.

There were about 3 lbs of apples in my large pan and I poured in a cup of water to help them cook down. In the long slow cooking that follows the water will evaporate. Some recipes says use a cup of cider vinegar as it adds a tang to the end product but I didn’t have any, so water it was.

The apples started to cook very quickly – maybe a couple of minutes and you could see them soften. It is important to keep stirring so they don’t burn.

After about 15 minutes or so, the apples had reduced to a soft mush, like apple sauce.

One of the things I was given from my aunt’s house was a Mouli food mill which is ideal for this next bit.

As you have cooked the skin, the core and the pips as well as the apple, you need to get the bits out and just have the smooth cooked apple left to transform into the apple butter. I used the finest plate and started to mill the apple puree.

If you haven’t got a  Mouli then you can do this next bit by pushing the fruit through a sieve. The Mouli is quick, though, so it could be a good thing to buy.

You can see how smooth the milled apple is and all the hard bits are left behind.

A beautiful, smooth apple puree.

I tasted the apple and it was sweetly appleish but quite sharp so 1 cup of sugar was added and stirred in.

The next part was to add the spices…. most of the recipes I looked at suggested nutmeg so I added half a teaspoon or so into the mix (thanks, Bear for taking the photo)

And all recipes said to add my favourite spice cinnamon – 1 whole teaspoon.

A pinch of ground cloves (yes, you can buy it ground but I couldn’t find my jar, so I ground up a couple or so of cloves with my trusty pestle and mortar and scooped up the finest bits)  and half a teaspoon of ground ginger were stirred in as well.

And then I started to stir. The heat was turned down to the bare minimum and I stirred.

Then I went for a nap and left the Bear to stir. So he stirred. All the descritptions of apple butter said that it had to be stirred constantly but we managed a stir every few minutes as the pan sat there on the lowest heat.

Anyway, it didn’t burn and we kept stirring. The apartment smelled gorgeous. Apples, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg  all mixed together is a truly delicious aroma. Even if you don’t want to make it  to eat then you  should make it just for the smell.

The recipes suggested that constant stirring at a slightly higher temperature would have the apple butter ready in a couple of hours.

We did it at a very low temperature for four or so hours… stirring it round until it looked like this

The sugars in the apple had caramelised and the puree had gone a lovely rich and golden brown. When I dragged the spoon through it, it was thick enough to leave a trail through the puree.

When I lifted a spoonfull of it up, it didn’t run off the spoon… so that meant, according to everything I had read, that it was ready.

It didn’t look to me like butter, but there you go, I’d got this far, I’d just have to keep going.

I’d sterilised jars by boiling water in them in the oven and I spooned in the apple butter

It looked brown and still not in the least bit buttery.

By now though, it was getting late so I let it cool and then put it in the fridge overnight.

What a transformation! It had set into a smooth and delicious spread…. yes, it was buttery in texture!

I’d done it!

It tastes delicious and on hot toast it is a perfect breakfast. It can keep in the fridge for three or four weeks (if it last that long) and for months in a properly sealed and sterilised jar.

What I am intrigued with are further recipes that I found – apple butter cakes, cookies or biscuits anyone?

Get out there, collect some apples and start making apple butter!

21 September – Since I posted this, a Canadian friend told me of a quicker way of making apple butter – you can find it on her page – Lorraine, another T.O.B. Cook

Foraging to make Fruit Leather – Part 2

So, we returned from our foraging expedition with two bags of berries. There were still huge amounts left on the bushes but we had to stop. I needed to see if the fruit leather experiment would work, or, at least, work for me. If it does then I am going back to get more.

Once back in the kitchen I picked through the berries and removed any leaves and stray bits that had fallen into our bags and put them straight into a large, heavy bottomed pan on a gentle heat to start cooking down.

The theory behind making fruit leather is that you have to cook the fruit and puree it, adding just honey or sugar to sweeten it (if necessary) and lemon juice. What you end up with is the very essence of the fruit so it is important to keep everything simple. There’s no need to add too much sugar…I suppose, though, it is a matter of taste. Berries, especially wild berries, can be very sharp and do need something to sweeten them. Just don’t go masking the fruit with an overload of sugar.

A sprinkling of sugar helps the berries start to cook down – there’s  no need to add water as the juices soon come out. Just look at that glorious colour!

Once the fruit was cooked, I strained the fruit pulp to get the majority of the juice out

There was still a lot of juice in the pulp so I got my mouli food mill out and started milling the pulp. This will keep the seeds out and push through the pulp. Wild berries are very seedy so you must try and get the majority of them out. If you haven’t got a food mill then try pushing the pulp through a sieve.

You can see how many seeds there are as the pulp gets pushed through

And underneath the mill you can see the pure fruit pulp being squeezed out

Last year we had gone to a Pick Your Own Fruit farm and came home with punnets of strawberries. I had cooked some of them down and frozen, in bags, those we didn’t eat. This was an ideal time to use up the last of the bags of strawberries and add some extra fruit to our fruit leather. There would be seeds from the strawberries, I know, but at least I had removed the majority of the blackberry seeds.

I added the juice of a lemon

And some honey to taste

And pureed it all to a lovely smooth mix before letting it simmer, bubbling gently for 5 minutes.

I lined a couple of baking trays with clingfilm

And poured in a thin layer of the fruit puree. It spreads out over the cling film. You don’t need a really thick layer – maybe 3mm or thereabouts? Put in a bit at a time and tip the tin back and forth to get an even layer.

My great plan to free up freezer space by making preserved fruit that didn’t need freezing wasn’t quite working out because I had puree left over.  Into pots it went and into the freezer. Some was poured over yoghurt that evening to have a a dessert after supper.

And then this is when I started to wonder how I was going to do the next bit….

Everything I had read suggested that the trays were then put into the oven on 50 degrees c (120 degrees F) and left for 6 hours. And yes, it was OK to use clingfilm and put it in the oven. That temperature is so low it won’t melt the clingfilm. What you are really doing, of course, is just drying it out, rather than cooking it. When this is manufactured on a large scale, dehydrators are used but an oven on the lowest temperature possible for a long time does the job just as well.

Thing is, it was 9pm and I was tired… did I start it off now and then set my alarm for 3am? Or did I try and stay awake till midnight and then turn the oven off when I got up for work?  What would happen if I left it in for longer?

I decided, in the end, to start it off before I went to bed and get up at three…. but then, of course, I ended up waking up every hour or so and going to check.  I thought I might as well so at least we would all have some kind of idea about cooking it.

For the first few hours it was definitely liquid and I thought I must have gone wrong somewhere but eventually

as the sun came up,  it became thicker and sticky… and at last it looked set.

It was darker and when I touched it it felt tacky but not sticky

I could peel it away from the cling film! It had worked!

Maybe it could have stayed in a bit longer as there was some puree still liquid underneath…

But really? I think it worked! It pulled up as a sheet just as I’d read it would do

I had two sheets of fruit leather

It was easy to cut into strips

And held up to the light it was the most beautiful colour

All I had to do now was put the strips into an airtight box and we had our supplies of fruit leather.

The big question, of course, is was it worth it?

Was it worth diving through the bushes, getting scratched and prickled to collect the fruit? Was it worth the constant getting up to check the progress of the leather? Would I do it again?

Yes, yes and yes.

I know that next time I will be more relaxed about the timing  – 50 degrees C is so low that leaving it in there for longer won’t harm it and next time when there’s puree left over I will simply make another tray of it.

The taste was fantastic – it really was the fruitiest fruity taste I’d ever had. The texture was smooth and chewy, but not horribly so… it soon dissolves. We have eaten it as a sweet treat  and also cut it into slices and stirred it through yoghurt.

Guess what? We’re going out blackberrying again.

Foraging to make Fruit Leather – Part 1

The Bear was finally home from his travels and we were  not at work.  It was also not raining or blowing a gale. For everything to come together like that,  is actually a very rare occurrence in our lives so we decided to make the most of it and go for a stroll and see how the blackberries were doing in the hedgerows. Goodness knows why the Bear and I went out to get more fruit because our freezer (and the freezer of everyone associated with our family) is already packed with fruit already. I suppose it’s just that  I just can’t bear to see waste. The brambles are absolutely laden with fruit and even the birds can’t get through that much.

This year has been fantastic for fruit – my apples and figs were fruiting heavily on the trees on the balcony and my mother’s fruit garden has produced more pounds of goosecurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants and gooseberries than we know what to do with.

We have had family and friends round to pick as much as they want and there are still pounds more to pick

It comes to something when even her young grandson is sent out to help get the redcurrants. He carefully showed me how best to get them off the stems using a fork to drag down the stalks, knocking the currants off as it goes and a bowl underneath to catch them.

The goosecurrants (two ancient bushes) are a cross between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry and they have been particularly prolific this year.

They make fantastic jam or jelly and my sister in law has made some spectacular jam that puts my mother’s to shame. Mind you, she is the one who did the Pheasant Breasting Masterclass  while my brother took the pictures,back in December, so you know from that that she has a real talent in the kitchen.

Even my mother’s  ancient apple tree that hasn’t borne fruit for the last 20 odd years has suddenly started producing. There are bags of cleaned fruit in the freezers just waiting to have something done with them. Enough jam has been made to go on toast and fill cakes until all of us are old and grey and we still have more bags than we can count. Cordials and ice creams are next on the list to make – all we are missing is the time to do them all.

But still, we thought, we might as well go and look at the blackberries. And besides, I had an idea for something. Something that wouldn’t take up any more freezer space. If we did get blackberries I would use them that evening.

We live on the top of a hill and to the side of where we are, is a lovely park. We can walk out along the private path and down into the park itself. It is a fantastic walk in every season of the year – in winter it really looks magical in the snow… in summer, people are out on the grass and now? Now the bushes are laden with fruit and people are walking round with bags.

The park is well maintained and the grass is mown and even the edges where the hedgerow plants are, are looked after. The gardeners  always leave the blackberry bushes to fruit.

Deep inside the bushes that line the edge of the park are old, abandoned apple trees that fruit heavily and the apples just fall to the ground.

Today though, we were there for blackberries. Plenty of people had been there before us so we were going to have to head deeper into the bushes.

We went further into the wild tangle of brambles – so wild they had entwined themselves around apple trees and the blackberries hung down alongside ripening apples.

Luckily I brought along a straightened out wire coat hanger (with the hook left, of course) so I could pull down the best of the blackberry branches.

We got lots of great big, fat and juicy blackberries with only minor damage to ourselves – a few scratches here and there and a minor tumble into the stinging nettles… but, as I assured the Bear as he lay there yelping in agony, it would all be worth it.

The thing about blackberries is that you have to use them the day you pick them. They must carry mould spores on them because if you leave them for a few hours, once picked, they will go mouldy.

There was a reason for me wanting to get more fruit, though. I wanted to try something I had read about over the past few years. When we first met, for our first Christmas, the Bear bought me “Preserved” by Johnny Acton and Nick Sandler – fabulous book that details all kinds of methods and recipes for preserving food. I’d read it and made plans to work through it but, as always, life got in the way and I never got round to it.

The thing I was most intrigued by was fruit leather – where quantities of fruit were pureed and then dried, in a thin layer, making a dried fruit sheet that lasts  without having to freeze it. It’s called leather because that is what it looks like – it is soft and chewy in reality.

So… something that could use up extra fruit and wouldn’t take up space in my freezer? That had to be worth a go, right?

Beef and Ale Casserole with dumplings

I’ve been craving big meaty dishes  recently. It’s the bad weather of course. That and still feeling sorry for myself after I fell on the ice and banged my head so hard. I still have a bump you know and  I just hope I don’t go bald because I have a very odd shaped head now.

When you think about it, that could have been a really nasty accident, so the best thing to do is to celebrate…. not with champagne… but with dumplings!  There’s something rather lovely about a dumpling, don’t you think?

I used to hate them – as I did anything that reminded me of a school dinner.

How on earth could a mixture of suet and flour possibly taste half way decent? My friends talked of the joys of a decent dumpling, all crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside, bobbing merrily about on a luscious stew or casserole but I still refused to have anything to do with them.

I have no idea what changed my mind but one day I thought it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I thought. I think I’d been to my favourite butcher and seen fresh suet for sale at a ridiculously low price and thought I had to give it a go. I knew that I had managed to conquer other fixed dislikes…. it really does come down to how things are made.

So if I was to experiment, then buying some suet for 33p wouldn’t break the bank, would it?

33p? For 282g? That had to be a bargain and I had to be able to make something decent with it. So I did. I looked up recipes and thought about what I wanted to achieve and then I made my first dumplings.

I’ve never looked back. I’ve made apple and chive dumplings to go with a chicken and cider casserole.

I made minty dumplings to go with lamb. I’ve made all sorts of dumplings and, do you know, I have enjoyed every one.

Now I fancied a beef and ale stew…and what would I do with the dumplings? I thought I would mix beer in them…

I had some lovely beef, just crying out to be made into a stew, and some incredibly beautiful looking carrots from the farm shop….

And I had some ale – Theakston’s XB. It would be the work of moments to get everything ready the night before and then just set it off in the slow cooker when I went to work. I’d be able to sit at my desk all day, knowing that while I was working, the supper would be cooking, and, best of all, when I opened the door of the apartment, I would be greeted by the smell of a rich and delicious stew. I love coming home to the smell of supper waiting for you. But until I become independently wealthy and can afford household staff, it is only going to happen when I sort things out by putting something in the slow cooker the night before…….

I really do think the slow cooker has been worth every penny I paid for it. I was always too cautious to go out leaving the oven on all day but I feel quite safe with the slow cooker. Maybe it is because I grew up with a gas oven and there was always the potential for explosion… I don’t know.

Anyway, fast as you can, peel and chop carrots and put half of them in the slow cooker

Sear the chopped stewing steak in a hot pan with some oil.

Put that in on top of the vegetables

Cover the meat with the rest of the carrot and onion, give everything a quick but generous shake of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and then pour in a bottle of ale.

That pan that you seared the meat in? Look at the lovely meat juices in there…

Add a spoonful of flour and stir it round to mix with the meaty juices

That will thicken the gravy beautifully while it chugs away when I am at work, so there’s no need to worry about cooking it out. Just get a smooth mixture

And pour it over the meat and vegetables in the slow cooker.

And that’s it till the next morning. Maybe ten minutes work, including wiping up.

One word of advice though… if you do this, as I did at 11.00pm, you will go to bed with everywhere smelling of fried meat. Maybe it would be better to do it earlier in the evening.

I wished I’d done it earlier as I lay there, trying to get to sleep, smelling meat that overpowered everything else, including the  lavender that I normally sprinkle on my pillow. Serves me right, eh? I should have got everything done sooner instead of leaving it till the last minute.

See that? Pitch black at 7.15 am and I am on my way out of the door – but not before I have turned on the slow-cooker. I use the Auto setting, which means it starts it off high and then turns down to low for the rest of the day.

And off I go to earn my pennies….

On my return, there’s a glorious smell of meaty loveliness… and all I have to do is mix up some dumplings.

Now, I would have fancied putting some horseradish in the dumplings to give them a bit of a zing, but the Bear hates horseradish (I really will have to do something about that…. ) so I think tonight I will mix the dumplings with beer, instead of water. That should give them a lovely beery, malty kick. Perfect for beef in ale….

120g of self raising flour and 60g of that lovely suet … mix it together with

a teaspoon of stock granules… I need to put some seasoning in – salt and pepper is good,  but I thought this might round the flavour out ….

 And instead of mixing it with cold water, a couple of tablespoons of beer will do just fine.

That does, of course, leave you with the rest of the bottle to deal with…..which might not be considered a hardship.

Anyway, roll that slightly sticky dough into dumplings (remember they will expand in the stew)  and pop them in, but because I am using a small two-person slow cooker, I can only get four in… so the rest go into the oven alongside some little potatoes which are baking….

they will  crisp up beautifully… while the others baste  in that gorgeous meat and gravy

They swell plumply as they bob about…..

And the baked ones have a gorgeous crispy crust…

Look at that – steaming, savoury beef in ale with dumplings that make you laugh with pleasure.

Can’t ask for anything more, can you?

Spicy Oxtail and the bump on the head

Yesterday was a work day and I was up before 6 as usual. I got up, showered, dried my hair and got ready for work and was out of the door by 7.25. I didn’t go to work though.

Instead, I spent the day here

stretched out on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, with an ice pack on my head.

Why? Well, I got out of the main doors of our apartments and slid along the black ice to my car. The pavements were like a skating rink and I thought things were bad, but at least it wasn’t snowing heavily.

I scraped the ice from the windows and waited till the car  was warmed up before setting off. The car (a huge and heavy old diesel, but excellent in bad weather) was slipping a bit… but at least I was moving. I got to the corner where we turn to go down the hill and saw cars sliding down sideways in the ice. Our grit ran out days ago and despite the best efforts of us all to keep the hill clear, there’s only so much we can do.

This was getting ridiculous and I thought that the best thing to do would be to put the car back and get the bus into work.

Turned out that the buses were cancelled. Our neighbours were all standing around and we watched the more foolish young ones try to drive up the hill to get out … the snow was whirling round and their cars were sliding backwards. One of the neighbours said the road had been closed to stop accidents and that the cars were being turned round.

So, being a good neighbour I went to see if they needed help pushing – the Bear and I had been out over the weekend to help and with just a couple of people helping, the cars can get moving again. Once it was clear maybe the roads would be better and we could all get out. Great idea, eh?

Except I stepped on black ice.  My feet soared upwards and I fell backwards cracking down on my head on the pavement. I lay there completely stunned until a really lovely neighbour picked his way across the ice to haul me up. That was it for me. I made it back home to show the Bear what a stupid thing I’d done.

I have a huge egg sized bump on the back of my head and all I wanted to do was to sit still with a bag of ice on the back of my head. I just lay there feeling very sorry for myself while the weather got worse outside. The snow had been thawing and the grass clearing  but now it was back with a vengeance.

Just as well, then, that I had started making the oxtail I had planned for tonight and the last thing I did before setting off was to turn on the slow cooker.

I’d been thinking about cooking the oxtail I had in the freezer and I wanted to do something different with it. I was thinking of a sharper taste to it than the normal beefy gravy and vegetables …… so at 11pm the night before,I started getting things ready.

That beautiful oxtail was only £1.98.

As with any slow cooked meat, you need to sear it, browning the outsides before you put it in the  pot. This is not just for cosmetic reasons, because the brown outside is so much more appealing, but because the slightly caramelised burt brown bits add to the flavour of the gravy.

While that was searing, I chopped an onion and put half of that in the base of the slow cooker pot.

A few cloves of garlic would be great with the flavours I was planning…….

The oxtail pieces went in on top of the onion, then the rest of the onion went on top

Then three dessertspoonfuls of hoisin sauce, with some ginger .. I was using a tube because, with all the bad weather, I hadn’t gone shopping much and I was running low on fresh ingredients.

I put in some Lea and Perrins to sharpen it slightly – a good shake of it, all over the top

and one of those lovely chillies from the chilli oil jar.

Some water and some stock granules to make sure there was enough liquid in there and that, as they say, was that.

OK so it was a bit late to be searing meat but I knew that all I had to do in the morning was turn it on.  I would get the Bear (who was to be working at home) to put in some cubed sweet potato at some point in the afternoon.

Still, it had only taken me ten minutes to get that ready so I couldn’t complain.

And how glad I was that I did it. I really couldn’t have managed to sort anything out after that bang on the head. I just lay there, listening to the occasional gloop and bubble sound from the slow cooker and breathin in  the spicy, meaty smell as it cooked.

I did manage to peel a sweet potato

and cube it, before putting it in on top of the half cooked oxtails, before going back to lie on the sofa.

And that was delicious. A jacket potato on the side was perfect to soak up the gravy.

We ate it at about 7 pm and it was a lovely mix of sweetness, sharpness and meatiness. You wouldn’t have particularly known that it was a mixture of hoisin and Worcestershire sauce but it did make a really lovely gravy.

All that from one oxtail, one sweet potato and one onion. Bargain!

Sabrina’s Chicken

When I was much younger, I took it into my head to have an adventure and set off to Morocco. I travelled around on ordinary buses, with chickens in boxes on the racks and priests blessing both the journey and the travellers. I ate at roadside cafes and in back street restaurants.  I slept on rooftops of village houses in the Anti Atlas mountains and shared food with the people who lived there.

It was my first real adventure and it was so exciting. The food was so vibrant, so different to anything I had eaten at home – you have to remember this was twenty years or more ago and for a girl from the north of England it was an entirely new world.

Ever since then I have always been intrigued by Middle Eastern and North African food and adore the complex layers of flavours and spices, so whenever I see something new I am irresistably drawn towards it.  I was reading Sabrina Ghayour’s Persian recipes on Foodepedia and spotted Koreshteh Fesenjan and knew that this was going to be next on the agenda.

Koreshteh Fesenjan is chicken stew with walnuts and pomegranate molasses – and the way Sabrina described it made me long to eat it.

I wanted to do it so much that instead of waiting until I got boneless chicken thighs as she suggested, I just took the only pack of chicken I had in the freezer and sorted through the larder for walnuts and my pomegranate molasses.

It didn’t matter – it was delicious… so delicious I think you ought to make this, so get your ingredients ready – Sabrina’s recipe feeds 6 to 8… what I’m doing will feed half that. There was a reason for that – in my greed and eagerness, I knew I had all of the ingredients, just not enough of them to make as much as she did.

That was OK. though. There were only the two of us and while we routinely have a second helping the next day we might not be wanting to eat it the day after that as well.

Get some chicken thighs  – you can buy a packet of them,  already skinless and boneless, (which would have been a better bet than the chicken legs I found, but what the heck!)

Chop a couple of onions

250g of walnuts – that was the two and a half, nearly three bags of walnuts I had .

They need to be ground and as we normally buy them as walnut halves then I have to grind them.  My Bamix has a grinder attachment, so I did it with that, otherwise use a food processor, making sure the walnuts are finely ground.

You will need two big pans for this… in the first, put a tablespoon of flour in and, over a medium heat, let it cook abit until it changes colour slightly.

See? I know it’s not a good photograph, but you can see what I mean.

Meanwhile , in the other pan, start cooking the chopped onions in a tablespoon or so of olive oil.  You want the onions to become translucent, then add your chicken, after seasoning it with salt and pepper. Turn the heat up and turn the chicken in the onions until it is well sealed. Then turn the heat off and leave it. 

Now, back to the other pan…. add the walnuts and stir them in to the flour. You won’t need any oil as the walnuts have, as Sabrina says, a high fat content

After about 5 minutes, add a pint or so of cold water

Give it a good stir and bring it to a gentle boil then turn it down, cover it and let it bubble along for about an hour. I thought that seemed long but I was determined to get this right – it is necessary so you cook the walnuts until you see the walnut oil forming on the surface.

Then stir in a tablespoon of caster sugar and just over half a bottle of pomegranate molasses – oh, I love that. It is sweet but not sugary sweet and sharp in a tangy way. Stir it in and make sure it all dissolves properly and then….

… add the chicken and onion from the other pan and stir round.

Make sure there is enough of the sauce to cover the chicken – add some water if you ned to and then leave to cook, very slowly, for a couple of hours, stirring it occasionally to make sure those walnuts don’t stick to the pan and burn.

The smell of this is divine, it really is.

A sneaky taste every now and again (just to check, you understand) bears this out….the walnut and pomegranate sauce gets darker and the smell fills the room.

Serve with basmati rice, says Sabrina, so that’s what I do to serve with it….

And then?

Have you ever eaten anything that makes you whimper quietly with pleasure?

Oh, it was more than delicious – the texture of the walnuts, with their lovely deep flavour, mixed with the sweet sharpness of the pomegranate molasses and the softness and richness of the chicken …. it made me wonder why no one had told me about this before.

I’m making this again, I tell you. All I can say is thank you, Sabrina for writing about this in the first place.

It needs time to do it, so choose a Saturday or Sunday when the weather is bad. Lock yourself in and make this to cheer you and your loved ones and be very glad that this recipe exists.