Blackberry hunting

We had to search very hard indeed  just to find this paltry amount of teeny-tiny blackberries in Epping Forest today.  The weird weather this year has not suited the blackberries.

The sun is HOT here right now - it has been nudging 30 degrees for the last few days - and Epping Forest did at least provide plenty of shade this morning while we foraged for our berries.

 

 

I think we've gathered just enough for a crumble, if I bulk it out with the apples from the fruit bowl too.  There won't be enough for blackberry jam, though, which is a great sadness.

Amish baked oatmeal

I can't remember where I first came across this idea, but it captivated me right away. 

Baked oats and fruit - a sort of solid, fruity, spicy porridge.  Eaten for breakfast, but with echoes of pudding.  All the recipes I found for it are American, and most refer to it as Amish oatmeal. So the recipe has an old fashioned, healthy German-Swiss heritage to it, which really appeals to me.

Oats are mixed with eggs, milk, a little sugar and loads of fruit and then baked in a pie dish the oven.  My final recipe below is an amalgamation of loads of different ones I found online.  I reduced the sugar content to a fraction of the American versions, because I really don't like my food very sweet, and I upped the fruit content to compensate.

The whole family adore this, and what should feed about six people disappears between the four of us in about ten minutes flat.  G, C and I like ours with natural yogurt on top and O likes hers plain.  Yesterday both G and O had third helpings.

Amish baked oatmeal

Dry ingredients:

• 3 cups porridge oats
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon or mixed spice 
• 1 cup chopped fruit or berries (I used blueberries)

Wet ingredients:

• 1 cup stewed fruit (I used apple)
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 100g butter, melted or vegetable oil

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a big mixing bowl.  Stir all the wet ingredients together in a large jug.  Pour the wet into the dry and mix together until thoroughly combined.  Pour into a large pie dish and bake in the centre of the oven at Gas 4 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.  Check that it is done as you would for a cake: poke the middle with a cocktail stick and make sure that there is no wet mixture left.

This is so easy to make that you could mix it all up while you are half-asleep and then go back to bed with a cup of tea and the new copy of Mollie Makes while it cooks.  For instance.  The smell while it cooks will drive you crazy with desire, and eventually force you out of bed and downstairs so that you can eat great, greedy bowlfuls of it for breakfast, washed down with another cup of tea.

I mean really.  What's not to like about winter when you've got this to get you going in the morning?

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This would be amazing with any combination of fruit.  I've seen many different permutations online:

• stewed rhubarb and chopped apple, with ground ginger in place of the cinnamon
• stewed blueberries and chopped peaches
• stewed apple and mixed frozen berries (no need to defrost them first)
• stewed plums and chopped apples
• stewed apple and chopped pears

You get the picture.

The inevitability of fruit picking

There is a cycle of inevitability about my visits to the PYO farm.

I love the idea of marching around the fields, picking punnet after punnet full of glorious, jewelled fruit .

I bring the children with me, and forget how fast and efficient they are at picking fruit.  They are no longer toddlers who spend five minutes looking under every strawberry leaf for caterpillars. These days they can strip a blackcurrant bush of it's fruit before you can say 'Ribena'.

I loose all sense of perspective as I stand in a massive farm, with fruit bushes, trees and neat rows of vegetables stretching away literally as far as the eye can see.

My trolley full of punnets and bags looks really quite modest in this context.

I get back home, unload the boxes of fruit, and realise that I have got carried away at the PYO farm.  Again.  This happens every year.

I stay up until gone midnight, scaring myself witless with boiling sugar - jamming and canning all the fruit.

The next morning I look at the stash of jars, piled onto the top shelf in the back kitchen and feel so proud of myself.  Here is a collection of summer fruit which will see us through the winter very happily.

I'll definitely be back again next year to repeat this cycle all over again.  You can find some of my previous years' adventures at the PYO and in jamming here, here, here and here.

This year's statistics:

Purchased

• 2 big punnets strawberries
• 1 big punnet plums
• 1 small punnet raspberries
• 1 small punnet blackberries
• 1 small punnet blackcurrants
• 1 huge bag French beans
• 3 courgettes
• 1 pot of honey

Made

• 1 enormous plum crumble
• 1 blackcurrant and almond cake
• 10 pots strawberry jam
• 8 pots blackcurrant and blackberry jam
• 4 large jars of stewed plums
• 1 enormous strawberry and almond crumble

And we still have 1 punnet of strawberries and 1 punnet of raspberries, keeping cool and available for greedy scoffing whenever we like.  That's the best bit.

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

Milkshake, chocolate and jam

We're nearly done with the back garden cherry glut.  There are just a few left on the tree now - so dark that they are almost black; teasingly dripping sugary juice directly into the hens' run on the ground below.  The children and I went to our favourite PYO very early on Saturday morning and picked six baskets of strawberries and bought a couple of big boxes of gooseberries as well - creating our very own strawberry and gooseberry glut instead.

Everyone had their own ideas of what do do with all this fruit.  Cam made endless strawberry milkshakes all weekend - about ten big, juicy strawberries, a large dollop of vanilla ice cream and half a pint of milk, all blitzed up in my blender and then gulped down, while lying prone on the sofa watching the tennis. 

Livvy wanted to make strawberries dipped in chocolate.

She's now tall enough to be able to stand at the stove to cook, so I showed her how to melt the chocolate over a pan of water, and then dip the strawberries in the chocolate and gently lay them down on the greasproof paper.  She loves the fact that she is now tall enough to cook by herself, and wants to do it all the time.

And I knew that most of the rest of the strawberries would end up as jam.  I made the jam yesterday afternoon - as the temperatures climbed relentlessly upwards. I was tired, hot, headachey and sticky by the end of the evening.  As I cleaned up the kitchen and all the jam making kit, I never wanted to see another strawberry again.

But when I saw all the pots of jam (all eighteen of them!) gleaming in the sunshine this morning I was delighted.

Livvy's right.  Strawberry jam rocks.

Cherry hands

The sights and sounds of midsummer in our garden - two children, home from school, with cherry stained hands and faces.

A very useful cake recipe

I'm still sewing, taking photos and saving them up to do one enormously impressive blog post in the New Year about how I managed to cut up some of my favourite fabrics, make them into things and them give them away. You're impressed already, aren't you?

In the meantime, I think we should have a recipe - haven't had too many of these around here lately. This is one of the most useful cake recipes I own. Infinitely adaptable, very easy, and devoured with pleasurable groaning by everyone who has a slice.

The List Writer's Fruit and Almond Cake

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I love almonds, and the solid, fragrant dampness they give to cakes. Bakewell Tarts are one of my all time top five things to eat, but I don't often make them because they're a little bit too faffy. Pastry and sponge? No, I need my almond cake to be made very quickly, when the need for an almond hit strikes.

Everybody else around here loves these fruit and almond cakes too. The one I made on Thursday was gone by Sunday morning.

The last, lonely slice

Ingredients:-

• 175g softened butter or marg
• 175g caster sugar
• 175g self raising flour
• 75g ground almonds
• 3 eggs
• half a teaspoon almond extract (optional - leave it out if you're not an almond freak like me)
• Chopped fruit - roughly enough to fill a cereal bowl

One of the most useful aspects of this cake is that it works with all kinds of fruit. For last week's cake I used big, red plums - six of them, stoned and cut into slices. For this week's version I used five eating apples, cored, peeled and sliced. Pears, fresh apricots, rhubarb, cherries and raspberries also work very well in this cake.

Put all the ingredients, apart from the fruit, into a food mixer and beat well for a few minutes until light and fluffy. You can do it by hand, or in a food processor if you do not have a mixer. Line the base of a loose bottomed cake tin with parchment paper. I use a 22cm springform tin. Tip the cake batter into the tin and spread out slightly towards the edges. Arrange the fruit on the top in any kind of pleasing arrangement. You should have enough fruit to pretty much cover the top completely.

Put in the centre of the oven at 180c or gas 4 for 45 to 50 minutes, until the cake is golden brown and cooked through. The cake will have risen up slightly around the fruit.

Allow to cool completely in the tin before removing. Serve with coffee, some Radio 4 podcasts and a pile of sewing on the side.