A fruitful day

Today has been full of fruit. The English fruits at this time of year are my favourites - berries, plums, the first apples. I had planned to go to the local PYO again today, but they have sold out of most of their fruit, so we went to Waitrose instead. I bought two big boxes of Victoria plums (absolutely my favourite fruit in the whole world - when I was a child I would sit in the plum tree eating them until I gave myself stomach ache), two boxes of strawberries and some giant bramley apples. Then we stopped off in Epping Forest on the way home to go blackberrying.


I shouldn't have worn a skirt and sandals, but C did a noble job of bashing down the nettles for me with a very long stick. We picked a nice big punnet of berries, and C & O probably ate as many as they put in the punnet.

So what to do with all my lovely bounty?



My sister had told me that September's BBC Good Food magazine had a delicious plum and pistachio cake recipe, so O and I dashed off one of those:

And I just knew the blackberries and apples needed to be crumbled. Here is Nigel Slater's crumble recipe:

• 450g bramley apples, peeled, cored and cut into chunks
• 450g blackberries
• a little sugar
• 100g plain flour
• 175g butter
• 50g porridge oats
• 100g demerara sugar

Put the apples in a pan with the little bit of sugar and a tablespoon of water. Over a medium heat, cook for about 5 minutes, stirring regularly until the apples just start to soften. Throw in the blackberries and transfer to a pie dish.

Rub the butter and flour together with your fingertips until the mixture looks like crumbs. Stir in the oats and brown sugar and scatter over the fruit. Bake at gas 6 for 30 minutes or until crisp on top. Serve with cream.

I made 6 little individual crumbles as they look cuter than one big one. They only take about 20 minutes to cook.

Even the hens got to enjoy some of the fruit - their favourite treat is apple cores. I swear they know when I'm chopping apples. Can they hear the knife on the chopping board? Can they somehow smell them? I'm not sure, but whenever apples are being chopped or eaten the clucking starts and they get more and more vociferous until I run outside and give them the cores. Here are Daisy & Betsy fighting over the last one.

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