plum (and pear) crumble

Using up: plums and a pear

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re not good with fruit.  we buy it, and are full of good intentions, but somehow we don’t actually *eat* it when we should.  So there was a punnet of six lovely golden plums sat by the fruit bowl, *looking* at me.  And a lone pear.

I cut the plums in half and removed their stones, and cut the pears into eighths; I’m afraid peeling wasn’t on the agenda.  I put the fruit in an ovenproof dish with about a tablespoon of water, then zapped it in the microwave for 2.5 minutes to start it cooking.  Then I added quite a bit of fresh grated ginger.

Crumble is easy - 2 parts flour (or equivalent*) to 1 part fat and 1 part sugar.  On this occasion, I used 5 oz of flour and 1 of walnuts, and whizzed it in the food processor with the butter, then added the sugar.  Put it on the fruit, pat it down, cook at gas mark 4 for about 40 minutes.  We ate it with good vanilla ice cream.

*Other things to substitute for some flour are porridge oats, or ground walnuts.

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apricot, almond and lemon sponge pudding

As always, I was looking to use up something; in this instance, a bowl of apricots that were going a bit wrinkly - I sometimes think this blog should be subtitled “reactive cooking”.  In fact, I think I will do just that!

[later] And I have, if you look at the address bar!

A bit of googling brought forther the fact that apricots are often flavoured with cardamon; I don’t know why I’d never though of it, because I love mixing fruit with spice.

So:  cut some apricots in half, and remove the stones.  Place them, cut side down, in a wide, shallow pan, and add some cardamon seeds (note: you want the little black seeds from inside the pods, not the pods themselves, if possible), a sprinkling of caster sugar (we like our fruit tart, so adjust to taste), a splash of vanilla essence, or a pod or whatever you prefer, vanilla-wise), and about half an inch of water.

Bring to the boil, then simmer gently for about five minutes.  Remove the apricots to an oven proof dish, then reduce the liquor to about half its volume by boiling it fiercely.  Pour it over the apricots.

In a food mixer, blitz 110g each of butter, ground almonds and caster sugar, 2 large eggs, and the rind of one lemon.  Pour this over the fruit, and then scatter flaked slivered almonds over the top - I did wonder if this latter might be an almond too far, but it wasn’t.

Bake for an hour at gas 4 / 180C, serve with ice cream or cream.  Truly lovely.

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rhubarb crumble

As always, bits of this are fairly random.  Serves 4 if they’re not overly greedy.

Take 3 good sticks of rhubarb, clean, trim, and chop into chunks.  I do mine in different sizes so you get a different texture when it’s cooked.  Some might say this was accidental, but it’s not.  No really.

Put into an ovenproof dish, and add a couple of dessertspoonsfull of elderflower cordial.  Or a bit more - I just went sloosh.  Sprinkle with some golden granulated sugar - probably the same sort of quantity, but we don’t like stuff too sweet.

In a food processor,  put:

150g plain flour
100g porridge oats
100g butter
100g soft brown sugar

Blitz until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.  Keep an eye on it, but don’t worry if it goes a bit lumpy; you can always recrumble it with your fingers.

Spread this over the rhubarb, put in a pre-heated oven at gas 4 / 180C for about 45 minutes.  Best eaten warm, ideally (in our view) with good vanilla ice cream.

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upside down pear pudding

Peel core and quarter 3 or 4 pears - enough to cover the bottom of a 20cm/8 inch cake pan. I use a silicon one, but if not, grease it well, and I’d line it with baking parchment.

In a food processor, combine 175g of butter and 175g of caster sugar until fluffy and soft. Add 2 eggs, and blitz again, then add another egg, 175g of self raising flour, and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Pulse till combined.

Spread the mixture over the pears, and bake at gas mark 4 / 180° for 45-50 minutes. Leave to cool for about 5 minutes, then turn out on to a plate.

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Sunday supper

As previously noted, we picked up the first local asparagus of the year on Saturday; with it, we cooked one of our favourites - asparagus stir-fried with ginger and red chilli. It sounds a terrible thing to do to fresh asparagus, I know, but trust me … it really is glorious.

We followed this with a rhubarb and ginger sponge pudding - bit piggy, really, but it is Sunday. I discovered the wondrous combination of rhubarb and fresh ginger a couple of years ago; I was following a recipe that called for stem ginger in syrup, and I thought it would be too sweet, so lobbed some finely minced fresh in instead. We’ve never looked back!

If you don’t have any ginger in the house (and you *should*, of course) remember that elderflower works wonderfully well with rhubarb too, so a splash of elderflower cordial would make a very good substitute, although I’d cut the sugar down a little in that case.

Rhubarb is a Very Fine Thing indeed.

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sometimes simple is good

There was a rather tired cauliflower in the fridge. So I made a cauli cheese, with breadcrumbs on the top. This is probably what posh people call “au gratin”.

We had it with spuds roasted in goose fat. Food fit for the ghods!

Oh, and more plum crumble. Groan. All gone now, however.

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weekend 19/20 april

We didn’t set foot out of the house. Made a batch of bananananana muffins on Friday night, and then we ate far too many of them, and both had a nasty sugar hit overnight. Serves us right.

Saturday, made soda bread for lunch, which we had with the previously mentioned chickie! soup. Supper was pork and pineapple - I went into autopilot while I was making it, and did a load of ginger, which isn’t actually in the recipe. Was still delicious.

Sunday was toasted soda bread for breakfast, and a moussaka for supper, followed - foolishly - by a plum crumble with ice cream. Belch.

I’m going to have to start photographing things, aren’t I ..

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