The Ordinary Cook

Crabapple and rosehip jelly

16 Comments / jam, preserves, The Ordinary Cook /

rosehip and crabapple jelly

I intended to make rowan berry and crabapple jelly this year. The rowan berries have drooped heavily this year. In fact, on our usual walk I have noticed several new rowan trees. Obviously they aren’t actually new trees I just haven’t noticed them before. Which makes me think that this year the trees must be particularly heavy with berries as I am not usually one to miss a foraging opportunity. Anyway, off I marched with my carrier bags, one for the crabapples, one for rowan berries and one just in case. You never know what you might spot.

It wasn’t until I came to actually pick the rowan berries that I noticed quite how tall each of my newly spotted trees was. Why hadn’t I noticed before that I needed to be several feet higher to get the berries? I managed a handful from a sapling growing on the side of a brook. Time for a rethink. That was when the spare carrier bag came in handy for the rosehips.

I made rosehip syrup last year in an effort to ward off any chesty coughs. So this year, we will be having crabapple and rosehip jelly by the spoonful if the common cold dares to visit. The rosehip is high in vitamin C and during World War II people were paid by the pound for rosehips so that the syrup could be made and given to children.

The apples and rosehips are bubbling as I write this draft and the scent is mesmerisingly good. I am looking forward to this jelly accompanying our winter sunday roasts and perhaps added to some herb teas. I think a spoonful might be a good addition to a sage tea to sooth sore throats.

750g crab apples
300g rosehips
water to cover
sugar, 450g for every 600ml of juice

Method

Wash the crab apples well and cut out any bruises. Chop roughly.

Wash the rosehips and remove the old flower and check for any creatures that might be hiding there. Blitz them in a food processor or chop finely. Bearing in mind that they are famed by schoolchildren everywhere for their qualities as itching powder, so you might want to wear gloves when handling them.

Place the apples and rosehips in a large pan and just cover with water. Bring to a simmer and simmer away until the fruit is soft. Put the pulp into a  jelly bag or a clean tea towel (I boil one in a pan two thirds filled with water for about ten minutes to make sure it is clean) and allow the fruit to strain over a large bowl. Don’t squeeze the bag or the jelly will be cloudy. A lot of recipes say that you need to leave it overnight, but the liquid in mine had drained through in a couple of hours, leaving a dry pulp behind.

Place a couple of saucers in the fridge for testing your jelly later. Measure your juice and pour into a large clean pan. Bring to boiling point. Add 450g sugar for every 600ml of juice and stir to dissolve. Boil rapidly once the sugar has dissolved and boil until setting point has been reached. You may have a scum come to the surface. Scoop this out. Setting point should take about ten minutes. But test for setting point after five minutes. To test for setting point take out one of the cold saucers and place a teaspoonful of the jelly onto it. Allow to cool and then push your finger through it. If it wrinkles then it is ready. Pour into hot sterile jars and seal.

I love the colour of this jelly, it’s much paler than the crabapple jelly I made two years ago. It has more of a rose blush about it. It’s well worth a try.

 

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Sesame seed cake

15 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

sesame seed cake

 

This is a cake made because of the right things happening at the right time. A cake created out of fate perhaps. I would never have thought of making a sesame seed cake. It seems like an unlikely pairing – cake batter with sesame seeds. However, I am here to tell you that you must try it. It has a soft moist crumb that is lifted with the slight bite of the sesame, you can just taste the richness of the toasted sesame oil and it’s a cake that improves with sitting about for a few days.

A friend gave me a packet of sesame seeds that he wouldn’t use. I love gifts like this as it forces you to think of something to do with an ingredient that you might not normally buy. We had also taken the girls to Birmingham to see the new library, which by the way if you find yourself in the West Midlands then you must visit. I love the building, from the outside it looks like a giant cake, which is always a good thing. The inside is pretty impressive too, you travel up the escalators past rows and rows of lovely books. It is deeply pleasing.  It has lots of interesting spaces where you can squirrel yourself away for hours – should you have the time. It makes me wish I was back at university, but I fear that I have already spent far too much of my life in that institution already. I find the whole concept of the city’s flagship building being a library very satisfying indeed. Anyway, back to the point. A visit to Birmingham is not complete without a visit to the Chinese supermarket. This time, among other treasures, I picked up a bottle of toasted sesame oil. So I found myself in possession of both sesame seeds and toasted sesame oil making this cake possible. How very glad I am for auspicious circumstances.

50g sesame seeds
120g softened unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 ½ tsp toasted sesame oil
2 eggs
150g plain flour
50g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
120 ml butter milk (or milk with a few drops of lemon juice mixed in and left to stand for ten minutes)

Method
Grease and line a 20cm cake tin and preheat the oven to 180°c, or use the baking oven of the Aga.

Lightly toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan until lightly golden and tip out onto a plate and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy and then add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each addition. Beat in the sesame oil and the vanilla extract. Fold in the flour, baking powder, ground almonds, salt and sesame seeds and then fold in the buttermilk.

Spoon the batter into the cake tin and level the top carefully. Bake in the centre of the oven for 25-30 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Leave in the tin for ten minutes and then turn out to cool on a wire rack, peeling off the lining paper.

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Broad bean puree

10 Comments / broad beans, The Ordinary Cook, vegetarian /

broadbeanpuree This isn’t a recipe that calls for exact measurements. Use however many broad beans that you may have, blanch them for two minutes in a pan of boiling water, drain and rinse with cold water. Then put them into a food processor, or a food mill, with as much garlic as you fancy, add a couple of small sprigs of mint and a glug or two of olive oil and whizz or mill into a purée. Taste and add salt and pepper and more oil if you think you need it. It’s delicious on toasted bread; bruschetta style, lovely as a dip  for other veg; hummus style, or added to pasta. For the latter I added a splash of cream to loosen it up a bit and I added some slow-fried courgettes into the mix.

I had some left over yesterday and added it as a layer to a moussaka, spreading it over the aubergines. Now I admit this didn’t make for the best colour combination – a sort of murky greeny-brown, but the taste was amazing, lifting the moussaka and giving it a summery zing.

We have been having it a lot, as you can probably tell.

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Cherry pie

8 Comments / pie, The Ordinary Cook /

cherry pie

I have mentioned before my generous friend with a wonderful garden. This week he has dropped off several baskets of freshly picked goodies, including cherries and green walnuts. I am very excited about the walnuts as I have wanted to pickle walnuts for a long while and there will be a post about this coming soon. But first the cherries. Here they are in all their glory.

cherries in bowl

Aren’t they beautiful? I love the blushing appearance and they are deliciously sweet. I decided to make a cherry pie with a third of them and the rest have been used to make one of my favourite drinks, cherry brandy, which will make its own post soon.

I have never made a cherry pie with fresh cherries before as it is unusual to have a bounty of cherries in England. You really do need to have access to a tree, either yours or a friend’s, and you need to get in there before the wildlife does. To buy cherries from the supermarket for a pie would seem like the ultimate extravagance as the price can be astounding. Many a time the girls have convinced me to pick up a bag of cherries, for me then to nearly have heart failure when the price appears on the scales. So it felt like a very special treat indeed to be serving this pie for sunday dessert.

500g cherries, stoned
50g vanilla sugar (or ordinary sugar if you don’t have any vanilla flavoured)
1 dessertspoon cornflour

200g plain flour
2 tbsp icing sugar
100g butter
2 egg yolks
1 -2 tbsp cold water

Milk to glaze

Method

I macerated the cherries with the sugar and cornflour for about an hour, whilst the pastry was made and chilled but I don’t really think it is necessary. Mix them together well in a bowl.

Make the pastry by mixing together the flour and the icing sugar and rubbing in the butter using your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolks and start to bring together into a dough, adding the water if necessary. You can do it all in a food processor too for ease. Shape the pastry into a flattened disc and wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least 30 minutes in the fridge.

Once chilled, remove the clingfilm from the pastry and cut into two pieces one slightly larger than the other. Roll the larger piece to fit your pie dish and press into the sides. Pour in the cherry mixture, spreading to an even layer. Brush a little milk around the rim of the dish. Roll out the smaller piece to fit the top of the dish and seal well around the edges. Brush all over with a little milk and cook in a preheated oven at 200°c, gas mark 6, or on the floor of the roasting oven of the Aga for 25- 30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown.

Serve warm with cream or custard, but it’s good cold the next day too.

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Bara Brith – the cake and the loaf

6 Comments / bread, cake, The Ordinary Cook /
The cake version
The cake version

 

The loaf version
The loaf version

I have become a little obsessed with bara brith. A long time ago someone used to make our family a bara brith on a regular basis. It was delicious. It became a little less delicious when we heard that she mixed it in her bath.

There are two types of bara brith. The cake version and the yeasted bread version. Bara Brith translates from the welsh as speckled bread, referring to the currants, raisins and candied peel within each slice. The arguments about which is  the real bara brith rage on. History has it that bara brith would have been the last loaf put in the dying oven at the end of the weekly bake, adding the fruit to the bread dough to make it a more palatable loaf.  When raising agents came into regular use the bread became a cake.

The cake version is often a tea bread with the fruit steeped in strong cold tea overnight. This makes it a very moist cake that lasts for days. Spread with butter, it goes very well with a flask of coffee and a beautiful view.

The bread version, though, I have been having trouble with.  I initially tried a version from a traditionally welsh cookery book. This particular recipe asks for wholemeal flour. However, I found that the enriched dough became just to heavy to get anything more than a small rise, making for a heavy bread. It tasted OK, but the cake tasted better. However, I was determined to keep trying.  I found another recipe, and this one uses plain white flour. The rise was much more successful, but perhaps not authentic, traditional bara brith.  If anyone makes a bara brith bread (the yeasted version) that they enjoy then I would be very interested in their recipe.

At the moment I think my heart belongs to the cake version. It lasts for days making it a handy cake to have in the tin.  The bread is just a little too heavy, even when made with the white flour and if I want a fruit loaf then this one wins hands down.

I would be interested in your bara brith thoughts to keep the obsession alive.

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Feeding a family of four for £3

10 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

Back in April I set a challenge for feeding a family of four for £3. Food poverty is becoming an increasing issue in the UK and food banks are experiencing an increasing demand. Food banks are not the entire solution, but they are an important way of making sure those in most need receive basic provisions when they need them most.

Fellow bloggers joined in and posted about the need to raise awareness of food poverty. My friend Rachel took part in the £1 a day Live Below the Line Challenge. The hardest thing for her was the lack  of fruit in her diet. Please do go and read her post about how she got on and how it has changed her perspective on consumption.

Another Rachel picked up the baton and posted about gnocchi with tomato sauce. A delicious dish made with ingredients that are cheap to source. If you aren’t already an avid reader of Rachel’s posts then I recommend that you scoot over there immediately and you will find yourself becoming a fan of her beautiful and thoughtful writing.

Nancy was my inspiration for this challenge and she too should be on your blog roll for her wonderful recipes and insights. She has posted many recipes that could be made for less than $4.

After I had started this challenge I watched Jack Monroe on BBC Breakfast and if you do nothing else today I want you to go straight over to her site and hear her views on food poverty. Jack has been living with it.

Choclette suggested dal as a delicious way to eat cheaply and inspired me to make one. Chip Butties and Noodle Soup also pointed me in the direction of her tomato and coconut lentil dal curry. Thanks to Choclette I also came across the Credit Crunch Munch blog challenge hosted by FabFood4All and Fuss Free Flavours. There are lots of recipes there for cheap and nutritious meals.

If you have any recipes that you want to share here please do let me know in the comments. If you have a food bank locally perhaps you could make a donation or volunteer your time this week.

 

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Quark moussaka

9 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

quark moussaka uncooked

 

 

 

 

 

quark moussaka cooked

Shortly after I posted about the coffee cake I made for a friend I received an email from The Lake District Dairy Co. about whether I would like a hamper with their new quark to try. The hamper duly arrived with several samples of Quark and a lot more besides.

Quark hamper

 

 

 

 

 

inside quark hamper

The hamper also came with plenty of recipes to try, many of which have been created for The Lake District Co. by The Fabulous Baker Boys. The hamper contained all of the ingredients needed for the moussaka recipe, but I couldn’t resist adding a few of my own additions and changes to the recipe provided by the Baker Boys.

1 aubergine, sliced into rings or into lengths
200g lamb mince
1 onion diced
2 carrots diced
2 celery sticks diced
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 red or green chilli, chopped finely
1 tsp of cumin seed
1 tsp dried coriander leaf
½ tsp smoked paprika
100ml red wine
400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp worcester sauce or mushroom ketchup
salt and pepper
Olive oil

For the white sauce:
30g butter
25g plain flour
200ml milk
200g The Lake District Co. Quark
salt and pepper

5og grated cheddar

Method
Lightly coat the aubergine with olive oil and place into a roasting tray in a single layer. Cook in a preheated oven at 200°c for about 15 minutes until golden. You can also sear them on a griddle pan. Leave to one side.

Fry the onion, carrot, celery, chilli and garlic in 2 tbsp of olive oil in a pan until the onion is translucent. Remove to a plate. Add the mince to the pan and fry until well browned. Add the vegetables back to the pan. Add the cumin seed, coriander leaf and paprika and stir for a moment or two. Add the red wine and bubble until it is reduced. Add the tomatoes, worcester sauce/mushroom ketchup and salt and pepper and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Simmer for 20-30 minutes until the tomato sauce is thick.

Make the white sauce by melting the butter in a small pan. Add the flour and stir well. Cook for two minutes over a medium heat, stirring all the time. Add the milk gradually, stirring all the time. Each time the sauce thickens up add a little more of the milk. You should have a smooth sauce when all the milk has been added. Add the quark and season to taste.

In a heatproof deep dish, layer half the mince then cover with a layer of aubergine and then a layer of white sauce. Repeat the layers. Cover with the grated cheese and cook in a preheated oven at 200°c for 20-25 minutes until the cheese has turned golden and crispy. I enjoyed mine with salad and bread.

 

 

 

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Dal with crumbed cauliflower

6 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

Dal with crumbed cauliflower

This post is part of my Feed a Family of Four for £3 challenge.

I was inspired to make this meal by a comment to my last post by Choclette of The Chocolate Log Blog. She reminded me that dal, served with brown rice makes for a nutritious and healthy meal.

For some reason I haven’t made dal for years. In my student days I practically lived off it. I would make a massive pot of it at the weekend and it would last me until Thursday.

I made this for us last week and then Chip Butties and Noodle Soup left a comment on my last post linking to her dal recipe, so it seems that dal is definitely the way to go.

I had bought a cauliflower with the intention of making cauliflower cheese. However, I thought that combining them with the rest of the tomatoes and some chilli would make a good accompaniment to the creamy dal.

The dal does contain turmeric and coriander, which might be costly to buy at first but  if you plan to make this a regular feature at the table then the cost per serving is small. Large Tesco stores ( and perhaps other supermarkets) sell spices at a more reasonable rate if you seek out the aisle  specialising in Asian foods. For example 300g of coriander seeds or 400g of ground coriander both come in at 99p.  400g of turmeric costs £1.99 or 99p for 100g. Independent Asian convenience stores also sell spices at low prices.  I have coriander growing in a pot so I used some of that to flavour mine, but ground coriander would have done the job equally well.

Chana dal costs £1.29 for 500g or £2.99 for 2kg. The tin of tomatoes costs 31p for 400g and I used half for the dal and half for the cauliflower. The cauliflower was from the value range at 69p. The chilli was from a pack of 4 for 60p. The breadcrumbs were from my freezer. If I have any stale bread left over, I whizz it up and put it in a food bag in the freezer. It was roughly the equivalent of a thick  slice from a bloomer so no more than 10p. The onion costs 14p as part of a pack of value onions. I did serve it with parmesan and fresh coriander, both of which I had in the house but are not integral to the flavour of the dish. All together this meal comes in at about £2.40 and served four people. We had some bread to mop up the juices which adds a bit more to the meal but keeps it under the £3.00 budget. It was a meal that we all enjoyed and will be repeated.

You can soak the lentils ahead of time to reduce the cooking time and therefore reduce the fuel needed to cook the dal.

For the dal
250g of split lentils or chana dal
1 litre of water
1 tsp turmeric
200g chopped tomatoes (tinned)
salt and pepper
1 tsp ground coriander or 4-5 sprigs of fresh coriander
1 onion, finely chopped
25g butter or ghee

Method

Rinse the lentils or chana dal really well and check over for any stray stones. Place in a medium-sized pan with the water and the turmeric. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes until tender and most of the water has been absorbed. Mash the lentils with a potato masher or fork. Add the tomatoes and coriander and the salt and pepper to taste and cook for another 15 minutes.

Melt the butter or ghee and cook the onion until lightly brown. Serve over the dal.

For the crumbed cauliflower:
1 cauliflower, cut into florets
200g tinned chopped tomatoes
1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
small pat of butter or glug of oil
1-2 slices of stale bread grated into crumbs

Method

Boil or steam the cauliflower until just tender to the point of a knife. Drain well. In a separate pan add the butter or oil and fry the chilli for a minute, add the tomatoes and simmer for a couple of minutes. Add the cauliflower and stir gently to coat it with the tomato sauce. Put the cauliflower in an oven proof dish and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs. Place under a hot grill for a minute or two until the crumbs are browned. Serve with the dal.

 

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Food Poverty – A challenge

18 Comments / The Ordinary Cook /

Feed four people for £3.00

We are lucky in this house. Every saturday we pile into the car, pick up mother-in-law and go to the supermarket to buy the week’s supplies.

I do shop carefully, checking prices, buying the bigger pack if it’s cheaper or the smaller pack if that works out cheaper (which, weirdly it often does). I try to buy seasonally for fruit and veg and buy British if it’s available.  However, when we have finished we normally have a trolley with enough food to feed us well throughout the week.

Our cupboards are full and our freezer more so. Our food shopping is supplemented in the summer and autumn by our veg patch. I can make biscuits or cake whenever I like as I always have the ingredients ready in the cupboard.  We can afford to buy chocolate and a bottle of wine or two.

I realise how lucky we are and I have been thinking about those who aren’t as fortunate and who are living in food poverty.

According to research funded by Kellogs and carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research in March 2013 4.7 million people in the UK are living in food poverty. The definition is based on having no choice but to spend more than 10% of the household income on food. The UK’s poorest households spend almost a quarter of their income on food. The richest households spend an average of 4% of their income on food. Single parent households and those in vulnerable groups such as the elderly are those most likely to be in food poverty. With the rising costs of food, spending has increased by about 20% but the volume of food that you can buy for that money has dropped by 7%.

Most weeks whilst shopping I notice that at least one of our weekly items has increased in price. Last week, for example, I noticed that the supermarket brand strong bread flour had gone from £1.00 to £1.21 – in the space of a week. I am not sure whether this is due to an increase in the cost of wheat or the Paul Hollywood effect. I really hope it’s not the latter.

A food bank opened recently in our town to help people who really struggle to feed themselves and their families on their budget. I intend to volunteer regularly with the food bank and to donate food too.

This week The Guardian reported that in the UK more then 350,000 people used food banks last year – 100,000 more than anticipated and this number is expected to continue rising. The research was carried out by The Trussel Trust. The trust currently manages 345 food banks but state that between 400 and 650 more are needed to feed those in need.

But food banks, whilst much needed to help those in crisis can’t be the only answer to the problem. There needs to be structural changes made at a more fundamental level so that people aren’t forced into living on the handouts of a food bank.

Nancy from Good Food Matters has been involved with food activism and food banks for a long time and she has done much to raise awareness of food poverty. She talked about the action that American food bloggers are taking  and recently posted a recipe that you could make if you had a budget of only $4 a day, which is a situation faced by 1 in 6 Americans on a daily basis. Nancy regularly inspires me with her writing and her food but never more so than when she discusses the need for action to stop food poverty.

This morning an email dropped into my inbox from Health Poverty Action asking if I would take part in the 2013 Live Below the Line Campaign which asks people to live on a £1 food budget for five days to raise awareness of food poverty all over the world. This is extreme food poverty that is experienced by many all over the world every day. The official five days are between 29th April-3rd May 2013. I can’t commit to these five days as I already have plans which would spoil the £1 a day for five days commitment but next week I intend to cook a few meals that can be cooked on a minimal budget and blog about them here. If you would like to take part in the challenge then click on the link above and sign up today.

Food poverty is an issue which affects many people every day and I realise how lucky I am to be able to buy the food that my family chooses to eat.

I welcome your thoughts on how food poverty could be tackled.

Now for the challenge. If you have a recipe for a meal that will feed a family of four for £3 (or under) then I would like you to share it with me. You can post it on your own blog and then contact me (kath at theordinarycook dot co dot uk) and I will do a round up on this blog at the end of May. If you don’t have a blog but have a recipe that you would like to share then get in touch and I will include your recipe in the round up. Please submit your links or recipes to me by Friday 24th May 2013. 

I hope that you will be able to join me in raising awareness of food poverty.

 

 

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Ginger biscuits

8 Comments / biscuits, The Ordinary Cook /

ginger biscuits

 

The sickness bug is visiting. My youngest came down with it yesterday. She was still eating  yesterday and wanted some biscuits. We normally make Poorly biscuits but I had caught a bit of James Wong doing his thing on Grow Your Own Drugs the other day where he said that ginger helps stop nausea. My youngest is rather partial to a ginger biscuit too.  So making these made sense.

They are very moreish and as they are best eaten the same day as they are cooked that’s all good. I have to say though no amount of ginger was going to help my little one overcome this bout of nausea, but the biscuits taste good. They aren’t shy about being ginger, and this is because I added the syrup from a jar of stem ginger instead of golden syrup. I like them all the more because of this. However, if you would prefer a more coy biscuit then use golden syrup for a more gentle ginger hit.

It’s only a matter of time before the eldest requires some biscuits too.

110g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
scant ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 rounded tsp ground ginger
40g granulated sugar
50g butter
2tbsp syrup from a jar of stem ginger or golden syrup
1 tsp runny honey

Preheat the oven to 180°c, gas mark 4 or use the Aga baking oven with the rack positioned above the centre.

Method

These biscuits are very easy to make if you have a food processor. Just place the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ginger in the bowl of the processor and whizz for a second to combine. Add the sugar and whizz again. Add the butter in cubes and whizz until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Add the syrup and honey and whizz until the mixture starts to come together. Remove the blade from the machine and work the mixture into a ball.

If you don’t have a processor, place the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ginger in a bowl, add the sugar and then rub in the cubed butter using the tips of your fingers until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the syrup and honey and use a butter or palette knife to mix the dough, then use your hands to work it into a ball.

Divide the dough into twelve balls and then flatten each ball out. Place onto a greased baking sheet or one lined with silicone sheet.  Press with the tines of a fork into each biscuit. Place into the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes until golden. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

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