Exam food

The children both have exams this week.  Olivia has her Year 6 SATs - four consecutive mornings of maths and English exams - and Cam has his first two biology GCSE exams; his third exam is in a few weeks' time.  They're taking it all in their stride, but I know that they're tired and tense too.  This feels like the start of many, many years of exams-in-May as they each work their way through GCSEs, AS levels and A levels (and beyond).

Cam, flopped on the sofa after a day at school and two hours of revision

I expanded the family rule of "When someone has a birthday, they choose what the family has for supper", to "When someone has a birthday or does an exam, they choose what the family has for supper".  Tonight we had Olivia's choice of beefburgers (nice, juicy quarterpounder steak burgers from Waitrose), oven chips, and rather specifically "carrots cut like coins, not sticks".  Very nice.  I don't often cook burgers so this felt like the treat it was meant to be.  Much ketchup was applied.

Cam's choice, which we are having on Friday, is lasagna, garlic bread and sweetcorn.  I don't often make a lasagna as it feels like too much faff at the end of a long day, so again this will be a special treat.  I love how both their choices are simple, slightly retro and not at all the sort of thing I normally cook.

My contribution has been to make them orange-scented buns for after school - I think they definitely deserve a sweet treat this week. 

Do you have any exam rituals in your house?  Any pre- or post-exam food favourites? Personally I don't really care what I eat after an exam as long as I have a big breakfast involving oats and bananas for breakfast beforehand.

Evolving appetites

Graham is training for a marathon again.  He came home last weekend after a long (over two hour) trail run, and his Garmin showed that he had burnt nearly 1,800 calories while he was out.  Which is an eye watering amount of calories for a single run - over two thirds of the recommended daily amount of calories for a man.  Unsurprisingly he parked himself down at the kitchen table and devoured vast platefuls of food, washed it all down with a banana and oat smoothie and then took himself off for a long nap.

The children too are eating vast platefuls of food and sleeping a great deal.  They are growing almost in front of my eyes...Cam is now within a centimetre or so of being taller than me, and Olivia already taller than her grandmother.  Teenage appetites have arrived in the house with a vengeance.

And so suddenly I find that my years of experience in cooking for four people don't count for much.  My previously precise quantities are all out of kilter, and what used to feed us all comfortably with second helpings and leftovers now barely feeds the children.

Toad in the hole

Baked oatmeal

Potatoes - ready to be roasted for a corned beef hash

Would you like some porridge with your syrup, Olivia?

Cherry and almond cake

I have gone back to doing a big brunch on Sunday mornings, which gives me a break from what sometimes feels like endless cooking and feeding of squawking baby blackbirds.  While Graham is out on a run, the children can lollop on the sofa watching tele, and I can leisurely potter about in the kitchen listening to Radio 4 in peace while I cook and bake.  I try and make at least three big, filling dishes that everyone can help themselves to, and come back to during the day if they feel hungry.  I don't bother making anything for lunch, and then we have supper a bit earlier than usual.  It makes the whole of Sunday feel lazy, indulgent and slow, which is just what I want.

Here's what has made it onto the brunch menu during January:

• corned beef hash
• herb omelettes with spicy tomato sauce
• Amish baked oatmeal (recipe here)
• banana and apple muffins
• huevos rancheros
• lemon and raisin pancakes
• savoury bread-and-butter pudding (grated cheese and bacon instead of the sugar and raisins)
• soda bread
• breakfast pizza (homemade pizza with breakfast-like toppings eg. mushrooms, bacon, tomatoes, eggs)
• spicy burritos
• oat and raisin muffins

We eat brunch at about 11am, but the children can't last that long without food.  While they are lolling and tele watching they are also eating fruit, toast or porridge - whilst waiting for brunch to appear....so basically they have breakfast AND brunch....

Abundance

We went to the PYO farm and picked redcurrants, blackcurrants, and raspberries.  Oh, those raspberries!

Just some of the fruit we came back from the PYO with

Then we went to the forest and picked blackberries.  So many blackberries!

Stewed apple and blackberries

It has been a incredible year for fruit in London.  I think the combination of wet spring and hot summer have suited the berries very well.

One of the great joys of going berry picking is the speculation about what you will do with your berries when you get home.  So far this summer I have made:

• apple and redcurrant crumble (at least three of these)
• raspberry and apple crumble
• raspberry crumble (two of these)
• raspberry and almond cake (using this failsafe recipe here)
• raspberry and vanilla cake
• blackcurrant and almond cake (same recipe as above)
• raspberry coulis
• stewed apple and blackberries
• lemon and blackberry loaf cake

Raspberry and almond cake

We have also stirred handfuls of berries into porridge, bircher muesli and plain yogurt for breakfast.  I am particularly partial to ryvita spread with cream cheese and then topped with raspberries or blackberries and a drizzle of honey.  We've had so many berries that I don't even mind Olivia standing in front of the open fridge eating great handfuls of them straight from the punnet.  

There is a generous abundance this year.

About half of what we picked during a stroll through Epping Forest

Well looked after

Friends old and new came out to the pub with me and we laughed, chatted and drank for hours.  Olivia drew me pictures and baked me a cake.  Cam let me have control over the TV remote so I could watch endless Glastonbury and athletics. My Mum and Dad phoned me at breakfast time for a chat.  Graham roasted a chicken and baked pommes dauphinoise.  The sun even shone for me.  It has been a great birthday weekend, and I have been very well looked after.
   

New Year's Resolution

Just one New Year's Resolution for 2013...

 

...eat more smoked salmon.

The perfect setting

I sat in the woods as the sun set, listening to the wind rustling the tops of the trees and marvelling at the changing light.  I had a plastic mug of very nice wine in my hand, and a campfire to toast my feet over.  I felt utterly content and took a self portrait.

Just two nights camping with friends was an idyllic break from everyday life.  These short trips usually seem to pan out like this, and it occured to me that over my many years of camping we - and our friends too - have acquired a great deal of experience.  It's a slick operation these days; we bring everything down from the loft, check it off our list, and stuff quilts and pillows into compression sacks.

Compressed quilts, sleeping bag and pillows



Decompressed quilt, pillows and sleeping bag

We stayed at Forgewood Campsite, in Kent, close to the Sussex border.  It is a delightful site which manages to create the perfect blend of wild camping (no electicity, no caravans, campfires permitted and acres of ancient woodland to pitch in) with helpful facilities (plenty of clean showers and toilets, purpose built washing up areas and a farm shop).  When we are camping with friends we want a campsite that lets us pitch our tents together, build a fire to sit round and cook over, and has woods for the children to run free in.  Forgewood had all of this.

Olivia, coming back to camp for food

We all brought great quantities of food - both to feed our own family and to share.  On Friday night we shared vegetable curries, made at home the day before by my friend, Cathy, and reheated over the campfire.  We mopped them up with breads we had all brought with us. On the Saturday we ate salads, also made at home and brought with us, fruit, slabs of homemade cake and endless cups of tea made on the Trangias and gas stove (of the three families camping one favoured a Coleman gas stove, one favoured Trangia with a gas bottle adapter, and one favoured Trangia with the meths burner - they all work brilliantly).  That night we barbecued sausages over the campfire, and ate them with garlic bread that Cathy made.  The children then toasted marshmallows later in the evening. 

Camp kitchen

We feasted like kings all weekend - good food is a non-negotiable element of a camping trip for me.  The only thing that can improve sitting in the sunshine, drinking beer with good friends, is when there's a perfectly cooked, juicy, pork sausage (or two) to eat at the same time.

The weather is something you can't control when you're camping - you just have to prepare for it.  The whole point of camping is to get outside and ground yourself in nature - whether that may be sun, rain, warmth or a cold breeze - but there's no denying that warm sunshine is what we're all after, really.  We pitched on Friday as the rain clouds started to clear from the skies.  It was extremely windy, and we were glad to be in the shelter of the woods.  The ground was very damp, but not too muddy because of the leaf litter on the forest floor.

My and Graham's tent, with added jubilee bunting

Over the evening the clouds moved further and further away, and by the time I crawled into my tent at about midnight, there were stars all over the sky.  It stayed dry for the whole weekend, and only started to rain as we brought the last of the bags in from the car, back in London on Sunday afternoon.

No wonder I look happy in that photo - I had good friends, good food, plenty of wine and beer, and I was sitting beneath green beech trees listening to them whispering.  The weather was incredible and our dirty children were running around in the woods jumping into ditches and plotting adventures. 

Every minute of packing, driving, pitching, unpacking, putting away and washing is entirely worth it for weekends like these.

Crunch

I do love coleslaw - but I only realised this a few years ago, after making it myself for the first time.  Shop-bought coleslaw is not to my taste at all: sickly mayonnaise, raw onion and tasteless carrots are the things I complain about most.  But homemade coleslaw is a whole other thing entirely.  Crunchy, fresh, light, full of flavour - it's an energising, satisfying thing to eat - not a weird, creamy garnish to be pushed to the side of your plate.

The key to a coleslaw which I will enjoy eating lies in the dressing.  I knew I didn't want plain mayonnaise, so I experimented with various other dressings - some with mayonnaise and some without.  I eventually settled on a blend of yogurt and mayonnaise, sharpened with cider vinegar and spiced up with a great deal of black pepper.

I love mayonnaise made by the French brand, Maille.  I particularly like this one, flavoured with a subtle hint of mustard.  I bring back several jars of it whenever I go to France, but they sell it in Waitrose too.

I don't like raw onion in coleslaw either - its flavour overwhelms everything else.  A finely sliced spring onion can be a nice addition, although is not essential.  The two key ingredients you need are cabbage and carrots.  I like coleslaw made with any cabbage - red, green or white are all good, although red cabbage does tend to bleed its colour a little and make the coleslaw a pale shade of pinky-purple.  This is not really a bad thing, mind you. 

In its simplest form the coleslaw I make is a quarter of a cabbage, sliced very finely, two fat carrots, peeled and grated, and a spoonful of dressing.  This can be put together for supper or lunch at very short notice - I usually have all the ingredients I need in my fridge.

But coleslaw can be fancified too.  Today I made a cheese and grape version, which was wildly successful.

The List Writer's Crunchy Cheese & Grape Coleslaw

For enough to feed a family of four, you will need:

• a quarter of a large green cabbage, cored and finely sliced
• 2 fat carrots, peeled and coarsely grated
• 50g mature cheddar cheese, coarsely grated
• a small bunch of seedless green grapes, sliced into quarters
• dressing to taste

For the dressing, mix together in a little bowl:

• 1 tablespoon of good mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons of natural yogurt
• 1/2 a tablespoon of cider vinegar
• lots of freshly ground black pepper

Put all the coleslaw ingredients together in a large bowl and mix together with the dressing  - a spoonful at a time until it looks right to you.  Use your judgement here - you may like your coleslaw more or less creamy than I do.  Any leftover dressing, or coleslaw, will keep in the fridge for several days.

Good things to add to simple coleslaw (in place of the grated cheese and grapes above):

• cheddar cheese and diced apple (I find if you grate the apple into the coleslaw the whole thing becomes watery and sour - dicing the apple is a much better idea)
• toasted sunflower seeds and sultanas
• sliced radishes and chopped roasted peanuts
• chopped walnuts (serve this walnut coleslaw with sourdough bread and slices of parma ham - completely delicious)
• a finely sliced spring onion

We eat our coleslaw with all sorts of things:

• cheese on toast
• jacket potatoes
• sandwiches
• peppery cumberland sausages
• a good pork pie from the local butcher

And once every few weeks, when I am feeling in need of a little lunchtime indulgence, I walk up the road to our local Pakistani cafe, buy one of their VERY spicy lamb samosas, and come home and eat it with a big pile of cooling, homemade coleslaw on the side.  It's a crunchy, spicy, flavoursome feast fit for a queen (or king).

10 things

• I have a big bag of kumquats and no idea what to do with them.  We tried eating them raw but they are horrid.
• I don't like making or eating marmalade at the best of times, and I think making it with teeny, tiny kumquats might send me over the edge.
• Check out this recipe.  The writer de-piths and de-seeds the kumquats before turning them into marmalade.  Once I'd seen how tiny the kumquats were, and how many of the little blighters there were in my bag, this task seemed truly epic and way beyond my levels of patience or enthusiasm.
• A friend suggested turning them into a compote, with almonds, which sounded nice.  And simpler.
• But kumquat compote (try saying that quickly) sounds to me like marmalade in disguise.
• Another friend suggested adding them to vodka.
• But I don't really like vodka either.
• The BBC Good Food website - my failsafe recipe search engine - has just three recipes involving kumquats.  One of which uses a single kumquat as a garnish.
• I was wondering if the hens would eat up the kumquats for me.  But I suspect not.
• Any other suggestions of what to do with them would be VERY gratefully received.

Good things in the kitchen

Good things have been happening in our kitchen lately.  Good, sticky, smoky, golden-coloured, slow-cooked, autumnal things. 

I find this time of year inspires me to cook more - my pottering-gently-around-the-kitchen-listening-to-Radio 4 approach to cooking suits stews, bread, roasts and cakes, which are what you want to eat at this time of year.  The children have been getting in on the act too.  C made the cheese and onion tear-and-share loaf you can see above.  We gave him the book from the most recent series of Great British Bake Off for his birthday, and he loves it.  So far we've had brandy snaps, hot chocolate fudge pudding and the bread from him.

All this sort of cooking tastes so good because it is made from a few simple ingredients, cooked slowly and with no stress on the part of the cook.  The smells fill the house with warmth and love.

We ate C's bread with this barbecued bean stew, which is a fantastic recipe for feeding a family very cheaply in a way which still seems luxurious.

Barbecued bean stew

• 4 rashers smoked streaky bacon, snipped into pieces
• 1 onion, sliced into half moons
• 3 fat cloves of garlic, finely sliced
• 1 stick of celery, chopped
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes, plus 1 tin of water
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 heaped tablespoon treacle or dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons cider or wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon tomato ketchup
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tin of mixed beans in water

Slowly, gently, fry the onion, garlic, celery and bacon in a large casserole dish.  There is no need to add oil, as the bacon will provide enough fat.  Stir absently while listening to the radio.  When the veg is softenend, but not coloured, add all the rest of the ingredients apart from the beans.  Stir, put a lid on the pan and leave to bubble very gently on a low heat for about 30 minutes while you go off and do something more interesting.  Tip in the tin of beans - no need to drain or rinse first - if you've bought them in water it's all good stuff.  Simmer slowly for another 10 minutes with the lid off.

Serve with bread to mop up all the delicious, smoky, barbecue sauce.

 

 

I made these beans in my favourite orange shallow casserole dish from Le Creuset.  This is mostly because I like how the orange dish looks with the orange-brown barbecued beans.  But the beans would also work well if you made them in a slow cooker.

I am new to the world of slow cookers.  I have my friend Nina to thank for my introduction to this way of cooking because the other week she tweeted about coming home from work to a chicken and cider casserole cooked in her slow cooker and said it was 'as if somebody else had cooked dinner'.  That short sentence meant I just had to look into this more closely - how often have you come in at the end of the day and wished that for once someone else had cooked dinner?  A very beguiling idea indeed!

I bought this model - a whopper with 6 litres capacity.  The shallow amount you can see in the photo above was in fact a chorizo and sweet potato stew which fed five hungry people generously last night.

I am not a great fan of gadgets as I don't have much space in the kitchen, so anything I get is considered carefully and has to be used regularly to earn its place.  But Nina was right, this slow cooker is a great addition to my kitchen. 

I wondered how it would be different to sticking a casserole dish in a low oven for a few hours, which I've been doing for years. The big difference is that the slow cooker is safe to leave on overnight or when I go out, which makes it much more useful than an oven at a low temperature.  It also uses far less electricity than an oven, so is more economical.

Spices and herbs have a more intense flavour cooked this way, so I ease back a little on those but otherwise just stick to my usual stew and casserole recipes.  The only thing that has to be pre-cooked is mince, which clumps together if not fried in a pan first.  Other than that I don't pre-cook anything, just chuck it all in and switch it on.  This means it is simple enough to do first thing in the morning, before I even lay the table for breakfast.

Last weekend I roasted a whole chicken in it.  I made a bed of vegetables: celery sticks, carrots, a quartered onion, six cloves of garlic, a handful of peppercorns and a bay leaf.  I sat the chicken on top, poured in a glass of dry cider and 200ml of vegetable bouillon, and left it on for seven hours.  I came back home to find a beautifully bronzed chicken and half a litre of the most amazingly intense flavoured stock I have ever made.  The chicken and stock were used to make four separate and incredibly delicious meals during the week.

Tomorrow I have plans for a rabbit ragu.  C and I watched Jamie's Great Britain last week and this recipe had both of us shouting excitedly at the tele.  It looked so good, and we all like eating rabbit in this house.  Normally a rabbit from the local butcher costs about £7, but the only one he had left today was an absolute whopper which cost me £14, and will probably make enough bolognese sauce to feed us all until Christmas.  The rabbit and all the other ingredients will go into the slow cooker and we shall see what happens.  I predict great things.

Milk

Yesterday, pottering around the garden, I was listening to my large back catalogue of podcasts.  One of them was an episode of Radio 4's Food Programme, all about milk.

Now I really, really love milk and I'll always happily drink a glass of it - especially ice cold, on a hot day.  I am of the generation that was given milk in little third-pint bottles every day at breaktime at school.  It was disgusting - freezing enough in winter to give you a sinus headache after just one sip, and warm, creamy and sickly in the summer.  The best bit about school milk was the satisfaction that came from stabbing the tight foil lid with a sharp straw.

School milk didn’t give me a life-long dislike for milk though.  I always liked a glass of it at home, or a good glug of it on my cereal.  I grew up in a small village and we had milk delivered from one of the farms in the village.  The milk occasionally had little bits of straw floating in it, and I think it was largely responsible for giving me a very robust immune system.

I still have my milk delivered now I live in London.  We get 3 pints of organic, semi-skimmed milk, four times a week.  Though happily, it does not have little bits of straw floating in it. However, just like the milk of my childhood, the organic milk is still non-homogenised, which I love.  This means we still have the cream on the top of the milk after a few days of it sitting in the fridge.  I never have to think about whether we have enough milk in the house - it is always there.  I love that convenience.

Very occasionally, if I can't sleep, I hear the electric purr of the milk float coming down our street at about 4am, and the milkman dashing up our path, swapping the empties for full bottles with barely a chink of glass, and dashing back to the van.  In the twelve years we've lived here I've never seen our milkman.  He is nocturnal and we communicate by notes left wedged between the bottles and the wall.

I craved milk so badly when I was pregnant for the first time.  I would drink a pint at lunch and another when I got in from work.  That baby, now my tall almost-twelve-year-old, will hopefully have strong healthy bones and teeth for life as a result!

Milk on its own is a foodstuff that divides people.  G and C are milk lovers, like me (perhaps, for C, as a result of me drinking it constantly through his pregnancy?) but O is not a fan (now I think of it, I craved peanuts when I was pregnant with her - and she really loves peanuts, so perhaps there is a link there somewhere?).   O does not like milk on her cereal or butter on her toast, but gets her dairy goodness in other ways.  These are all the ways we use our 12 pints of milk each week:

• porridge - both the children, and G, make their porridge with milk rather than water.  It is more comforting this way, somehow.  Porridge is eaten all year round here, even in the heat of the summer, and must be liberally sprinkled with chopped fruit and golden syrup.
• yogurt - I make about 2 litres of natural yogurt each week (which accounts for roughly 4 of our 12 pints) using the fantastic electric yogurt maker from Lakeland.  We love our yogurt - I stir it into curries, we have it with fruit for breakfast or with a sprinkle of brown sugar on top for pudding.  There is always yogurt in the fridge.  I use the last few spoonfuls of the previous batch to start the next one, and occasionally get a new starter in the form of a little pot of Yeo Valley.
• in tea and coffee - it would probably scare me to learn how much we consume in this way.
• as an ingredient in so many things I cook - bread, cake, pancakes, muffins, bolognese sauce, fish pie, macaroni cheese.  I'm always reaching into the fridge for one of those cold, white bottles.

I also cook with a great deal of creme fraiche (I like the Yeo Valley half fat version), but I have never tried to make it.  I didn't know you could until I read this post by Harmony and Rosie yesterday.  Her creme fraiche looks amazing - I really want to have a go at making some myself.

How about you?  Do you love milk?  Could you happily live without it?  What do you make with it?

Nibbles and snacks

Over the past month or two I have been gathering recipes and ideas for snacks and nibbles.  Little bites to stave off hunger - perfect for after school, around a campfire, with a chilled kir in the garden on a sunny evening, or any other time when supper is still a way off and you want something tasty to nibble on that isn't cake.

I now have a good collection of favourites, and I try to make them on Friday evening and Sunday evening so that we've got a good supply for the weekend or week ahead.  Here's what I made this week.

Honey and Soy Seeds

This recipe is by Annabel Karmel, and I always make it for camping.  It is also great for packed lunches because it contains seeds, not nuts, so is permitted by schools with a no-nut policy.  Children go wild for it and eat it by the handful.

• 1 tablespoon sunflower oil
• 75g sunflower seeds
• 75g pumpkin seeds
• 1 tablespoon runny honey
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce

Heat the sunflower oil in a non stick frying pan.  Add the seeds and stir to toast them for a couple of minutes, or until they are lightly browned.  Remove the pan from the heat and add the soy sauce and honey.  It will sizzle like mad.  Stir for another minute and then leave to cool.  Store in an airtight container - will keep for up to a week, but there's no way they'll last that long!

Oatcakes

This recipe is by Jill Dupleix, an Australian cook who used to be the Cookery Editor for The Times.  She writes beautifully simple recipes, packed with flavour, and this is the one of hers I make most often.

• 120g oats
• 100g plain flour
• 80g butter
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

Put all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.  With the motor of the processor running, add cold water 1 tablespoon at a time until the mixture comes together in a big clump (about 2 to 4 tablespoons altogether).  Take the dough out and roll it on a floured surface until it is about 1cm thick.  Cut out into rounds with a biscuit cutter.  I use my smallest cutter which is 4cm across, but it is entirely up to you how big you want the oatcakes.

Bake on a non-stick baking sheet at Gas 4 for 10 to 12 minutes.  Cool on a wire rack and store in an airtight container.

I LOVE these served with a dab of cream cheese and some herbs or sundried tomatoes but the toppings are endless.  They are also delicious with:

• hummous
• slices of avocado
• stinky blue cheese
• little French cornichons
• roasted tomatoes
• little snippets of salami
• aubergine dip

Russian roulette popcorn

• a large saucepan with a lid
• 1 tablespoon of sunflower oil
• popping corn
• 1 tablespoon chilli oil
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 heaped teaspoon chilli flakes

Make the popcorn by putting the sunflower oil and enough popping corn to just cover the base of your pan into the saucepan and heating over a medium heat with the lid on.  Shake the pan occasionally and after a few minutes you will hear the corn start to pop.  Keep the pan on the heat, still shaking it from time to time, until you can't hear any more popping.  Turn off the heat and tip the popcorn into a large bowl.

Gently heat the chilli oil, butter and chilli flakes in a saucepan (I re-use the one I just made the popcorn in) until the butter is melted.  Tip slowly over the popcorn and stir everything around for a minute or two.

This popcorn gets its name from the fact that you never quite know how much chilli - if any - you will get on each mouthful of popcorn.  The children love this excitement and dare each other to eat just one more mouthful. 

If your family are not chilli lovers you can make a lovely rosemary version by keeping the butter but swapping the chilli oil and chilli flakes for olive oil and finely chopped fresh rosemary.  Will keep in a tin for a few days.

What savoury snacks and nibbles do you like to make and eat?  I'd love to increase my collection of recipes!

A new approach to fruit gluts

I have had a really good crop of rhubarb in my garden this summer.  I have been cutting big handfuls of stalks, like this one I cut last night, every couple of weeks.  There is not enough rhubarb here to call it a glut, but there are still many things I will do with it:

• poached very briefly in orange juice, to eat with yogurt for breakfast
• put into a cake - Nigella has plenty of recipes, and there is also this fantastic one from Driftwood that I have made several times
• rhubarb and apple crumble

However, I have also been tackling proper fruit gluts this summer.  The branches on the plum trees at Mum & Dad's house were snapping under the weight of plums.

A glut of cherry plums in Mum & Dad's garden

And the wild hedgerow plum trees all through southern France were dropping plums and sweet juice all over the roadside.  When we went for walks we gathered and ate the plums as we walked.

Just look at the glee on their faces at yet more sweet plums!

Gathering greengages in my dress on an evening walk

Mum had already made several batches of jam before we arrived, and I had spent a few days making strawberry jam back in England, so our stocks of jam were already good.  And jam making is a slow, hot and sticky business when the weather is hot too. 

I saw a great range of these Le Parfait jars in the local supermarket and suddenly thought I might like to have a go at canning, or bottling, the plums.  Canning seems to be the word used in America, and bottling seems to be the word used in Britain, but they are exactly the same thing.  In France they use the word 'conserver' to describe everything from jam making to pickling of cornichons.  Like our umbrella term 'preserving'.

The internet gave me a million different methods of bottling fruit, and these varied wildly according to which country the instructions came from.  In the end we went with a method that was part various American YouTube tutorials and part a kind friend's emailed excerpts from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook.

This is what we did:

• We halved and stoned the plums and put them into sterilised jars. 
• We made a 50:50 sugar syrup, using 500g caster sugar and 500ml water, and when it was still hot poured this over the plums until it reached the mark at the top of the jars. 
• Then we placed the first lid (the lid that seals the jar) lightly on top, and then partially screwed the second lid on top. 
• To seal the jars you then have to heat them.  This is where I was most unsure of my method.  Some sources said to heat the jars in a water bath, some said to heat directly in the oven.  Times and temperatures varied wildly.  Hugh F-W said we could do either method, so we went with the water bath.
• We put the jars of plums into a large pan, sitting them on a folded tea-towel.  Then we poured boiling water into the pan until it came half-way up the jars. 
• The pan full of water and jars then went into a hot oven (gas mark 8) for forty minutes.
• The jars were taken out and left to get completely cold overnight.  Then I checked that the first lid had completely sealed, and tightened the second lid.

The whole process was far quicker than making jam, and gives you fruit preserved in syrup, which can then be eaten with yogurt, cream or custard, and made into cakes or crumbles.

We learnt that we needed to pack the fruit in much, much tighter than we had done the first time, and that we could also use a much weaker sugar syrup.  175g of sugar to 600ml of water makes a good syrup that works on any type of fruit apart from the very sourest (such as damsons or gooseberries).

But even so the whole experiment was a great success.  We opened one jar a week later to try it out, and were swooning with delight at how tasty it was (nothing to do with the very sweet 50:50 sugar syrup, I'm sure).

Slightly obsessed by this point, I went on to bottle some tomato sauce.  The weekly markets always had incredible tomato stalls and one Sunday I succumbed to this enormous crate for €10 (which I then lugged around the crowded market, while C and O pretended not to know me).

I also bought a huge bunch of basil and a bag of garlic and shallots, and made industrial quantities of tomato and basil pasta sauce.  I spooned the hot sauce into the sterilised jars, put on the lids as I did for the plums, and then sealed them using the same water bath method.

And when we came to leave Mum and Dad's to drive to Switzerland, the car boot was half full of bottled plums and tomato & basil sauce.  I also brought back some more jars from the supermarket so that I can do some bottling at home, but if you want to have a go yourself you don't need to go to France for the jars and replacement inner (sealing) lids.  You can buy them online here and here.

This week I'm off to the PYO farm, because they still have plenty of summer berries and tomatoes for me to pick, and I still have a dozen empty jars waiting for me in the kitchen.

My fruit glut - ready to be put into the car and driven home, via Switzerland

A box of meat

I love good food, and I love cooking, but I do have a slightly uneasy relationship with cooking meat.

I didn't eat meat at all for nearly five years in my early twenties.  I just didn't enjoy the taste and texture of meat, and found that meals involving meat always revolved around the meat, rather than letting the other ingredients sing out.  So I stopped eating meat, got to know the world of vegetables and pulses, and was very happy. 

And then, aged twenty-six, I became pregnant, and suddenly with every fibre of my being, I craved meat.  I dreamed of lamb stews, sausages for breakfast, game terrine, chicken curries and pork pies.  I began to eat meat again, and re-discovered my taste for it.  I still eat meat now, eleven years on, and I enjoy eating it too.

But those years of not eating meat were the years when I really taught myself how to cook properly.  As a result, I find meat rather dull to cook with, and I always end up stocking the freezer with the same old cuts and feeling uninspired to try new recipes.  My best experiments usually seem to be the meat-free meals or the cakes and puddings. 

As a family we eat meat-free about half the time, which is fine by all of us, and fits in with the way of thinking, espoused most famously by Hugh F-W, that "Meat is the most precious of foods....It has its special status by virtue of being the flesh of animals, which must be killed in order to provide it." (River Cottage Everyday p.180).  I want to feel good about the meat I eat, and accord it the respect it deserves.  The meat I buy and eat does not necessarily have to be organic, but it does at least have to come from free-range animals that I know have been raised and slaughtered in a humane way.  So I buy my meat from the free-range selection at Waitrose, or from our local butcher, AG Dennis in Wanstead, who will tell me where the meat is from.  I eat less meat, so that I can afford to buy better quality meat.  But all this still does not get around the fact that I find meat so very uninspiring to cook with.  

One morning I had a moment of revelation as I was rambling on to someone about how wonderful our weekly vegetable box from Abel and Cole is for making me cook with ingredients I might not otherwise buy at the supermarket.  "Do you get a meatbox too?" my friend asked, and suddenly it seemed so obvious.

Abel and Cole do sell meat, and I have a regular order for their streaky bacon.  From time to time I also add other meats from them to my order.  However, they don't sell meat boxes and I am still guilty of ordering the same old familiar cuts of mince, diced lamb, chicken thighs and sausages from them.  I needed a meat box selected by someone else, which would introduce me to cuts of meat I wouldn't normally buy.

So I ordered a medium sized mixed meat box from Riverford Organic.  I winced at the price - £66.95 - but reminded myself that this was an experiment and if it proved to be poor value for money I didn't need to order it again.

My box came a month ago, and this is what the £66.95 bought me:

• 600g braising steak (two large steaks)
• 8 rashers unsmoked back bacon
• a 1.2kg joint of boned pork loin
• a ham hock (800g)
• a large whole chicken (1.7kg), with giblets
• 300g finely sliced cooked ham
• 10 pork sausages
• 400g diced pork
• 600g minced beef
• 1 mini black pudding (a complimentary taster)

All of this was organic.  When I unpacked the box, I was suprised just how much meat this was in reality.  I was relieved that I had cleared some space in the freezer in the few days before the delivery.  I had a happy afternoon sorting through everything, looking at use-by dates, working out what I was going to cook when, and what should go in the freezer, and finding recipes.  Out of this selection, the ham hock, pork loin and braising steaks were all new cuts to me; I had never cooked them before.

A month later, we have eaten everything in the box apart from the pork loin joint.  I would expect the pork loin to provide meat for three meals, so that would mean that the £66.95 has fed all four of us with meat for five weeks in total.  The only additional meat I have cooked in the last month has been four chicken thighs from Waitrose, and one pack of Abel and Cole's streaky bacon.

Here is my fabulously nerdy list of everything I cooked with all the different cuts of meat, and how many portions I got out of it all.

• black pudding - two portions for Sunday breakfast, with roast tomatoes and toast.
• sliced ham - sandwiches for eight, and part of a pasta sauce (with courgette, a little stock and creme fraiche) for four.
• whole roasting chicken - four greedy portions as a roast dinner, four portions using  leftovers in a chicken and pepper fricasee, four further portions using leftovers in chicken and sweetcorn soup, and one final portion as part of a packed lunch.
• I made two litres of chicken stock and chicken jelly from the giblets and the bones from the roast - this was used in the chicken and pepper fricasee, the chicken soup, the ham and courgette pasta sauce, and also in a pea risotto which made two portions.
• back bacon - 5 rashers were used in a quiche lorraine, which fed six, and the remaining 3 rashers were made into a large BLT sandwich for one.
• braising steak - I diced one of the steaks and made a mild beef curry, which fed four.  The other steak I cut into think strips and made a super-hot Hungarian goulash, which made six portions.
• ham hock - I cooked the hock in coca cola, using Nigella's famous recipe.  The resulting ham fed four of us for supper with egg and oven chips.  The cold leftovers were then used over the next few days to make a sandwich for one, added to scrambled eggs for one, and stirred into couscous and spinach for four.
• beef mince - I made this into a savoury beef and cheese crumble which made five portions.
• diced pork - I made two four-portion pork, cider and mustard pies.  One for supper with new potatoes and one for the freezer.
• sausages - I made a rich sausage and cider casserole which fed four of us (greedy portions - we all love sausages)
• pork loin joint - not yet cooked, but hopefully to be roasted for four and then leftovers used for two further meals.  Probably a pie and a pasta sauce.

Assuming I get the twelve planned portions out of the pork loin, and discounting the portions from the chicken stock, I make this a grand total of 79 portions.  Meaning that each portion of organic meat works out at roughly 85p. 

I have loved cooking with all the unfamiliar cuts of meat, and searching out new recipes to use.  I have loved the taste and high quality of all the meat.  I have loved not having to think about shopping for meat for a whole month.  I also think that although the £66.95 is an alarming amount to pay for meat all in one go, it nevertheless represents very good value for money. 

I am planning on testing this out later in the summer by buying meat just from the local butcher and supermarket for a month and keeping a similar log of everything I buy and what I cook from it.  I am interested to see how much money I end up spending per portion, and how imaginative or otherwise my shopping and cooking will be.  I suspect I know the outcome already.

Sunday Marketing

The children and I have a happy new Sunday morning routine. While G goes for a run or a swim, we get on the bus and go a couple of miles up the road to Walthamstow for the weekly farmers' market.

C, on the bus to Walthamstow, doing his impression of a teenager

Walthamstow has a famous daily market which is a wonderful madness of stalls selling fruit and veg, clothes, toothpaste, buttons, sweets, handbags, shellfish, CDs and herbs. The stallholders are all local Eastenders and they bellow their prices at the top of their voices to the crowds squeezing past.

But the Sunday farmers' market is very different. It is part of the London Farmers' Markets organisation and is much smaller and quieter than the weekday version. The stallholders just sell food and drink and are all producers. Many are from Essex and Kent but others come from eye watering distances to sell here. They don't bellow as loudly as their midweek counterparts.

The first stall the children and I always stop at is The Giggly Pig Company who are there every week (their website gives details of their shop and all the other markets they sell at). I love their slogan: "No fat or crap in our sausages!". The women manning the stall each week are so kind and offer the children endless free samples. I often buy their sausages but the highlight is their faggots, which are the best I have ever tasted - savoury, meaty and not too salty. Ask C what is favourite food is at the moment and he will say faggots.


They're an old fashioned and rather unfashionable food I think, but I'll keep singing their praises and so will my children. Are any of you fans?

The next stop at the market has to be a cheese stall. The cheese producers vary each week; last week we had a buffalo cheese producer from Gloucestershire and this week the Lincolnshire Poachers were there. Yet again they were very understanding about my greedy children sampling every single one of their cheeses. But maybe the stallholders are wiser than me, because pretty soon I had O asking for this one, C asking for that one, and I ended up buying both.

The last stall was one at which I got to do ALL the sampling - the Millwhites Cider stall. So good.


And actually doing all the sampling myself didn't make me any more decisive. I bought one of each type of cider on the basis that G would need to try them all as well.