Mmm...Canada: Bumbleberry Grunt

There are just some words that bring a smile to my face.

"Bumbleberry" is one of them. Sheer onomatopoeic bliss, to my ears at least.

I've done some reading on bumbleberry--and while it may not be a Canadian term, it certainly is embraced in many kitchens across my fair land.

Add "grunt" -- both as in a Nova Scotian blueberry grunt and another bit of culinary onomatopoeia referring to the sound of the fruit erupting through biscuit dough -- and I think we've got a dish that sounds as good as it tastes.

Bumbleberries, of course, don't exist. The term refers to a mixture of berries, of no particular ratio. Sometimes it includes apples (as this one does), sometimes rhubarb. I mostly have bumbleberry pies and tarts, to use up last bits of berries or to make up enough filling for a pie.

Grunts are one of my favourite quick puddings. Unlike many where you simmer fruit on the hob, this one is entirely done in the oven. I've outlined how to make steamed dumplings below, but if you want more of crispier top, don't cover the dish with foil after you've dolloped the dough over the fruit.

I do recommend serving this shortly after making it. Otherwise, the dumplings could absorb the fruit juices, and you'd be left barren of those that gorgeous claret-coloured sauce.

Bumbleberry Grunt

Yield 1 22cmx22cm (9"x9") pan; Serves 4-6

Ingredients

For the fruit

140g (250ml/1c) blackberries

150g (250ml/1c) blueberries

125g (250ml/1c) raspberries

160g (250ml/1c) strawberries (quartered, if they are large berries)

1 tart baking apple (such as a Granny Smith), peeled, cored and chopped into 1cm pieces

100g (125ml/0.5c) sugar

1.5tsp (7.5ml) cornstarch

125ml (.5c) water

0.25-.5tsp (1.25-2.5ml) orange flower water OR 1tsp (5ml) vanilla extract

For the dumplings

220g (375ml/1.5c) all purpose flour

1Tbsp (15ml) baking powder

0.5tsp (2.5ml) bicarbonate of soda

0.25tsp (1.25ml) salt

1Tbsp (15ml) sugar

30g (20ml/2Tbsp) cold butter

80-125ml (0.33-0.5c) buttermilk (or more, if needed)

Method

Preheat oven to 200c/400F.

Combine fruit with sugar, cornstarch and orange flower water or vanilla. Tumble into a 22cm square (9"x9") tin. Pour water over top. Cover tightly with tin foil and pop into the oven for about 20 minutes, or until bubbling.

About five minutes before the fruits are done stewing, set to work on the dumplings.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt and sugar. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Pour in about 80ml of the buttermilk and gently mix, adding more liquid until you have a soft, but not damp dough.

When the fruit is happily blurbling away, remove the tin from the oven and carefully decloak the foil from its top. Drop the biscuit dough over top the bubbling fruit, leaving gaps, so the juicy liquid can flow and burst atop the grunt. Replace the foil, covering the tin carefully. Return to the oven for 20 minutes.

Serve while hot.

To serve:
Place a spoonful or two of dumplings in a bowl and spoon the fruit mixture and its juices over top. If you wish, serve with Chantilly cream, custard or ice cream.


cheers!

jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Mmm...Canada: Food Day: Blueberry-apricot frangipane tart

I heart July. It starts with Canada Day and, this year, it ends on Food Day.

It celebrates what we eat and how we eat it. It highlights what's here naturally, from fish and shellfish, to beasts and birds to crops and wild fruits and veggies. It recognises each crop and herd brought by waves of immigrants from cows and pigs to wheat and from indigenous foods to crops and herds brought over with each successive immigration wave.

Mmm...Canada. We are a nation of lucky eaters.

Admittedly, the vast majority of my foodbuying happens in megamarts of varying sizes. When I can, from spring until autumn I travel out past the roundabout to Herrle's in St. Agatha. They're a local treasure, known for having the best produce grown either by the Herrle family or by other local or close-to-local growers.

The market itself evolves as the seasons do. You won't find corn in April and it's highly unlikely saskatoon berries will offered in August. Here even the most removed from food cycles are aware of the specialness of the produce: deep red tomatoes heavy from their juices, signs leading shoppers to the freshest-picked beans at the back of the store, gaggles of shoppers at bins of their famous corn, their arms filled with ears destined for a pot of water or for the barbecue. It's not like my usual megamart.

Yesterday I made a point of heading out to St. Agatha. I returned with a bagful of goodies: yellow and green courgettes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, apricots and wild blueberries. I'll probably beg My Dear Little Cardamummy for guidance in replicating her courgette and tomato curry and the sweet potatoes will be roasted. But the fruit?

The weather has cooled off a tad and this Jasmine no longer wilts in the heat and humidity. As a result turning on the oven isn't arduous, but a pleasure. Especially when a tart is to be had.

This tart is a variant of the Bakewell Tart Daring Baker's challenge I hosted last year, ably assisted by my dear Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar: but this time the frangipane is sandwiched between fruit layers atop a sweet shortcrust.The resulting rich, sweet nuttiness is perfect for sharing on a day that celebrates food.

Blueberry-Apricot Frangipane Tart
Makes one 23cm (9") tart

One quantity sweet shortcrust pastry (recipe follows)
Bench flour
2Tbsp apricot or blueberry jam, warmed
One quantity frangipane (recipe follows)
200g (1c) (wild) blueberries, rinsed and picked through
5-10 apricots, sliced into eight wedges each.

Crust:
225g (0.75c+ 3Tbsp) ap flour
2Tbsp sugar
0.5tsp salt
110g (0.5c) unsalted butter, cold (frozen is better)
2 egg yolks
1-2 Tbsp cold cream

Frangipane:
100g (7Tbsp) unsalted butter, softened
100g (0.5c) sugar
2 eggs
2.5ml (½ tsp) almond extract
100g (1 scant cup) ground almonds
3Tbsp all purpose flour

For the crust:
Sift together flour, sugar and salt. Grate butter into the flour mixture, using the large hole-side of a box grater. Using your finger tips only, and working very quickly, rub the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Set aside.

Lightly beat the egg yolks and quickly mix into the flour mixture. Keep mixing while dribbling in the cream, only adding enough to form a cohesive and slightly sticky dough.

Form the dough into a disc, wrap in cling and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes

Place the chilled dough disc on a lightly floured surface. If it's overly cold, you will need to let it become acclimatised for about 15 minutes before you roll it out. Flour the rolling pin and roll the pastry to 5mm (1/4”) thickness, by rolling in one direction only (start from the centre and roll away from you), and turning the disc a quarter turn after each roll. When the pastry is to the desired size and thickness, transfer it to the tart pan, press in and trim the excess dough. Patch any holes, fissures or tears with trimmed bits. Dock the crust with a fork and chill in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F. Line the tart tin with foil and pour on the baker's beans. Bake for about 10 minutes.

For the frangipane:
Cream butter and sugar together for about a minute or until the mixture is primrose in colour and very fluffy. Scrape down the side of the bowl and add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. The batter may appear to curdle. Pour in the almond extract and mix for about another 30 seconds and scrape down the sides again. With the beaters on, spoon in the ground nuts and the flour. Mix well. The mixture will be soft, keep its slightly curdled look (mostly from the almonds) and retain its pallid yellow colour. Set Aside

Assembling the tart:
Spread as even a layer jam onto the pastry base. Tumble the blueberries on top. Slather on the frangipane, spreading to cover the entire surface of the tart. layer the top with as many of the apricot wedges as possible (depending upon the size of your slices, you'll probably have leftovers. Just eat them).

Pop into the oven for 30-40 minutes. The frangipne will poof from between the fruit slices, brown and set.

Remove from the oven and cool on the counter. Serve warm, with crème fraîche, whipped cream or custard sauce if you wish.

When you slice into the tart, the almond paste will be firm, but slightly squidgy and the crust should be crisp but not tough.

cheers!

jasmine


I'm a quill for hire!

AddThis Social Bookmark Button" src="http://s9.addthis.com/button1-bm.gif" width=125 height=16>

Buckle, buckle, who's got the blueberry-peach buckle?

I do! I do!

Well, I did...all gone now.

My dessert preferences have definitely taken a turn towards rustic and hearty. Don't get me wrong. My heart still skips a beat when I see a fancy, schwoopy, piped, spun-sugared architectural marvel. But really, the older I get, the more like myself I become and apparently foof-less desserts are what I am.

Un-iced cakes and cupcakes, crisps and cobblers...serve me some of those and I'm as happy as the Cookie Monster in a Peek Freans factory (really...cookies aren't a sometimes food).

This year, my baked go-to dessert has been studies in baked, stewed and roasted fruits. I know I haven't posted much about this, and I'm not sure why. Maybe my thoughts are deluded in that they aren't fancy enough to blog about. Maybe they are so omnipresent in my kitchen that I just don't think of them as blog fodder. Really, everything that comes out of a functional kitchen (even one with Beelzebub) is food blog fodder.

Residents of my part of the world know this has been an odd summer with the coldest July on record for a good 15 -20 years. Normally, I'd have turned my scullery into an ice cream factory by now, but with such pleasant temperatures, I've kept with my baked fruit desserts. In cooler months, I'd usually be using wintered fruits--apples, pears or some canned or frozen fruit--so it was a bit of a treat for me to use in-season blueberries and peaches for this buckle.

Buckles--at least this one--combines the best of several dessert worlds. A stewed fruit base, a cakey top and then there a streuselly top. Add ice cream, custard, chantilly cream or just straight pouring cream and I think this may be pretty darned close to a perfect dessert...if I could figure out a way to incorporate cream cheese icing, then I would call it a perfect dessert.

While this isn't a true non-recipe recipe--the cake part is, as we know, chemistry and we know what happens when things go askew so it is necessary to measure things out--the fruit and topping are really done by feel and can easily be changed to match your mood, palate and pantry: change the fruits to what's available, just keep roughly the same weight and spice or sweeten it to your taste; if you want to add Scottish Oats or chopped nuts to the topping go ahead. It's all up to you.

Blueberry-Peach Buckle
Fruit layer
500g chopped peaches
250g blueberries
1 rounded Tbsp cornstarch
2-3 Tbsp brown sugar
pinch of salt
squeeze lemon juice

Cake layer
200g ap flour
1 dspn baking powder
salt
110g butter
100g sugar
two eggs
125ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

Topping:
50g sugar
50g ap flour
1/2tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp nutmeg
50g butter

Preheat oven to 350F/180C.

Tumble the fruit layer's ingredients into a 9" cake pan (or equivalent).

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; set aside.

Cream together butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time, then mix in milk and vanilla.

Stir in sifted flour mixture and pour over fruit.

Rub together topping ingredients, to a sandy texture. Sprinkle on top of the batter.

Bake for 45 minutes or until golden. and a skewer comes out cleanish.

Serve warm with ice cream, custard, chantilly cream or pouring cream, if desired.

cheers!
jasmine

What I'm reading: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I'm a quill for hire!

Blackberry pan jam

Every once in a while I wonder why some produce in the mediumscarymegamart is relegated to the 50 per cent off rack.

Some things I can understand--apples that look as if they were stuffing from Muhammad Ali's punching bag, capsicums so wrinkly no amount of Botox would save them, bags of salad greens that look as if they were dredged from the local patch of wetlands.

Last week I rolled by the rack--they usually have giant bags of still-good mushrooms begging to be sent to a good home. No mushrooms, but four containers of absolutely lovely and almost blemish-and-fuzz-free blackberries (no, not the RIM crackberry). It could have been a mistake--whether "on purpose" (as in staff trying to get cheap food for friends who show up at the *exact* right time), or overzealous stockers trying to get rid of them for whatever reason (really, let's not guess)). But they had the neon pink triangular stickers screaming their affordability...I couldn't say "no" to that, so I bundled four containers into my trolley and went on my merry way to ponder the universes of sweet potatoes, roasting chickens and freezer bags.

Apart from nibbling on them here and there, or tumbling them on ice cream, I realised that I was a greedy guts and bought more than I could realistically finish before they really deserved to be on the discount rack. What to do what to do...

I suppose I could have frozen them, but nah. I came up with something better (well, for me at least)

Pan jam, that lovely makeshift jam perfect for small batches of fruit. I suppose you could sterilise a bottle or two and properly preserve them, but when you only have about a cup or two's worth of jam, it's just easiest to keep it in the fridge and have it with your morning toast, on ice cream or enrobe it in bits of leftover pastry (waste not, want not, I suppose).

And yes...whenever I think of or make "pan jam" Ram Jam starts running through my head...always Black Betty...which then makes me crave apple brown betty...with dollops of jam.

The recipe is rather loosey goosey. It is done to taste and is totally based on the sweetness of your fruit. My ratio of fruit to sugar is 10:1 by weight. So, in other words, for 100g of fruit, add 10 g sugar and then adjust if you want it sweeter.

Blackberry pan jam

300g blackberries, rinsed

30g sugar (plus more, if necessary)

a squeeze of lemon, lime or orange

a splash of vanilla

Add fruit and sugar to a pan over a medium hob. Stir together, eventually the fruit gives up its liquid and starts to become...jammy. Taste for sweetness and add more sugar if you want. Stir for about five minutes, add the citrus. Stir for another five-ten minutes, depending upon how thick you want the jam. Stir in the vanilla and decant to a bowl. Store unused jam in the fridge.

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays

Well here we are...the final Milk Calendar Monday. I'd like to add "ever" to the end of that last sentence, but who knows, it may come back...but not for a long, long time.

The new calendar arrived a few weeks ago and I do admit that, at first glance, the recipes look more interesting via Indian, Thai, Greek and Vietnamese influences, but it also keeps some of what really bugged me in the 2008 calendar--I don' think anyone will successfully convince me that adding three cups of milk to a curry is a good thing.

The final 2008 recipe is their Almond Cranberry Loaf. Gosh, it looked pretty on the calendar...and it was marginally seasonal--cranberries always get me into a Christmassy mood. The recipe read well enough, and as usual the "for the adventurous" recommendation of adding dried apricots and substituting hazelnuts for almonds made me sigh...heavily.

Here, I admit to a couple of changes, to suit what was in my pantry. I'd actually run out of milk the day I made this, so instead I used the equal amount of yoghurt. I also was in the midst of fruitcaking (yes, I am a charter member, founding president and chief fruit macertator of the Fruitcake Liberation Front), so I was up to my elbows in pecans and chucked them into the bread instead of almonds. But I did use the apricots as recommended for the adventurous.

The bread itself wasn't too bad--a bit heavy, and I do like my fruit breads fruitier. Overall, a mostly inoffensive cake.

For those of you who want to relive my pain, here's a link to all the Milk Calendar Monday adventures.

I don't know about you, but I think I deserve a mug of heavily cognac-ed egg nog after this year-long adventure.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Sensational Smoothies

For those of you who've followed my little Milk Calendar experiment, you know that I don't think very highly of many of the recipes I've tried thus far. What started off as a bit of curiosity, a bit of fun and a bit of a yen for easy and tasty recipes more often than not ends up a bit of disappointment, a bit of frustration and a yen for the fast food mall up the street.

Last month's recipe was bad..badbadbadbadbad. The one before set off my snark-o-meter. The one before that was good-okay. To save pixel space, let's just agree to say that that's a good summation of all the recipes thus far.

So I hope you understand when I admit to being a bit...ummm...trepidacious when I try the next calendar recipe. And you won't be overly surprised when that trepidation turns to paranoia when the recipe works, is somewhat tasty and makes me almost happy that I tried it.

July's sensational smoothies were already in my bad books for using "sensational" in the title. Basically, I thought the milk people were trying too hard to sell me on the concept--shades of the travesty that was "Faster-than-take-out chicken and veggie chow mein." Maybe it was a self-preservation thing, but I decided to try two of the three offered recipes--blueberry-banana-orange and pomegranate sunrise I opted out of the raspberry lemon. But allow me to put on record here that I think "pomegranate sunrise" is a nauseating title, reminiscent of some 1970s disco-crazed lippy colour.

Okay...they weren't "sensational" by my rather middling standards, but they were sensational by the calendar's.

The blueberry smoothie was quite pretty with its bubbly mauve top, and while the pomegranate one was not as pristinely delineated as in the calendar's picture, was still quite attractive.

Both smoothies were very quick, tasty and surprisingly hunger-ending. Who'd have thunk recipes when in their original and untampered states would hold their own?

So here's where my innate paraonoia kicks in...

Is this the token "hey, it works and I might want to have it again" recipe? Or is this just the beginning of a better half of the calendar to lull you into looking forward to the next calendar? You know...enough good recipes at the end to make you forget about the bad stuff that happened in the first half, so by the time the next calendar comes tucked between sales flyers for all those things the shops over-ordered and are trying to convince you that your Great Auntie Ermintrude would love for Christmas, forget how...unappetising the recipes were in the first half of the year.

I don't know but we've got the balance of 2008 to find out.


cheers!
jasmine

On my rickety shelves: The Fruit Hunters

Thanks to the good people at Doubleday Canada I found myself on a juicy and luscious, sweet and addictive, and disturbing and thought-provoking adventure.

The Fruit Hunters: A story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession
by Adam Leith Gollner
Doubleday Canada
280 pages
$29.95

Adam Leith Gollner is a fruit hunter, travelling the hemispheres in search of the sweet, the sour, the juicy and the sublime. His collection of adventures, people and revelations are bound in his first book The Fruit Hunters: A story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession.

A “fruit hunter” you ask?

Yes. This is a man fascinated by fruit...a foodie with a fruit fixation.

Gollner is the Canadian correspondent for Gourmet Magazine, and has written for The New York Times, Bon Appetit, and Good Magazine. It’s through his work where he met some (if not many) of characters and delicacies he commits to page.

The book’s Brazilian prologue marks a low point in Gollner’s life: a grandfather’s death, divorcing parents, friends with mental illnesses and a long-term girlfriend who has run off to Europe to spend New Year’s with her lover. Then he spies it: a tree that seems to grow petrified bran muffins that are packed with orange segment-like seeds (the paradise nut). He searches for some in a local shop and leaves with a sac filled with native fruits—sweet, Styrofoam-textured jambos, wine gummy-cum-crème caramel abius, and the lavender-fruit-punch-flavoured maracuja.

The flavour revelations mark the start of an adventure that will take him to jungles and orchards, to marketing offices and plantations—all the while tasting delicacies that some of us have never heard of, meeting some decidedly scary people and discovering far more about geopolitical realities intertwined with pods, bushes and trees.

The Fruit Hunters is about sex, drugs and rock and roll: coco-de-mers, which look like a woman’s midriff, hips, reproductive area and thighs, African cherries for prostate illness, and the yohimbe tree for its…ummmm…invigorating…effects.

In many other hands, fruit could be treated with a blinkered botanical eye. Not Gollner. His fruit finding tales comes to life through of the people he meets along the way—a nonagenarian fruit hunter, fruitarians (people whose diets are totally fruit-based), botanists, smugglers, cross breeders and marketers.

This book is also about what’s happening to the fruit trade. There’s the obvious: mass production’s impact on what’s in my bigscarymegamart’s produce section—January’s sour, crunchy Californian strawberries, apple-hard, sometimes mealy and utterly flavourless peaches. Then there’s the unsettling: the untested effects of colorants on humans. And of course, there’s what sounds scarily unappetising: coating apples in what is a human-safe solution (but still technically a pesticide) to morph the flavour of an apple to be more grapelike.

Gollner is a strong writer whose vivid and entertaining prose made me feel as if I was his travelling companion, sometimes tasting his finds. It's an adventure story, a mystery, a thriller and comedy in the guise of a food/food history book. For me, one of the biggest compliments I can give a writer is reading passages aloud to the poor soul who just happens to be within earshot…thank goodness my friends know I do this as some of them heard a lot from this book.

I’ve been food shopping a few times since I got the book and have perused the fruit aisle “hunting” for my latest find. I’m more enthralled with our local in-season offerings. But truth be told, I haven’t picked any of the exotics—the dragonfruit, the passionfruit, the things without signage but look hairy, gnarled, spiky or just plain cool—because I know from prior attempts, they weren’t picked for their flavour, just their transportability.

Will the sour or flavourless and unripened exotics offerings top me from trying these fruits? Nope. It just means that I’ll have to stalk my prey a little longer or go slightly farther afield to bag my game...that should keep me going until Gollner writes his next book.


cheers!
jasmine

Pluots

Oh my...if I'd realised the pluots I'd used in the latest Daring Bakers challenge would have garnered this much attention, I would have included a few words about them in that post.

Pluots are a new stone fruit , developed sometime in the latter part of the last century by Floyd Zaiger, a fruit geneticist. He is known for developing two types of fruit, the pluot and the aprium. From their names, you can tell they are plum-apricot crosses.

Broken, down, pluots are about 75 per cent plum and 25 per cent apricot. Because of their size, shape and fuzzless skin, they look a lot like plums.

Their flesh is juicy (look at the top photo and you'll see driblets on the plate) and (when ripe) is almost honey-sweet.

They are grown in California and Washington State--I don't know of any Canadian producers, but I suspect there should be some.

There are more than 20 pluot varieties, but neither my bigscarymegamart, nor my mediumscarymegamart bother to identify which types they sell. For ages I thought we only got one type (the top two pictures): a midnight purple skin with soft reddish-pink flesh.

Today when I went to pick up some, they had different type (bottom two pictures). Its reddish with with orangy yellow skin can look a little like a nectarine. Its flesh is orangey-red, but I don't think the ones I bought are as ripe as they should be (moments of sweetness, but also was a bit sour and not as soft).

Like most stone fruit (and berries) the way I tell if they are ripe is by their aroma and texture...they smell floral and sweet and they are slightly yielding witha firm grasp. Then again, I like my fruit well ripened ("rotten" according to My Dear Little Cardamummy, who prefers things a bit more astringent).





cheers!
jasmine

In a crunchy but slightly mushy mood

As a run-up to Mmm...Canada, this week's posts will feature Canadian foods and food products. Today's post uses oats.

About two months ago, when I outted myself as a pinhead, I mentioned my sudden craving for granola.

Our dearest Ivonne visited me about a year ago and brought with her a parcel filled with homemade granola. It was so good--sweet and crunchy, studded with cranberries and blueberries--I had it with milk, yoghurt and ice cream...I was even grabbing handfuls as snacks. Wanting to satisfy my craving, I emailed her for the recipe and she obliged.

That's one of the things I really like about being a part of the food blogging community. We can ask each other for hints, recipes, techniques and even the occasional ear or opinion and it's generally freely given. No questions asked.

We visit each other's pages and riffle through their recipe books and pantries. We ooh and ah at intricate pastries and commiserate over horrible casseroles. Our dishes span many cuisines and courses, not to mention lifestyles and preferences. We dare each other to expand our horizons and invite one another to create new foods.

We can say "Hey! I want to do an event featuring my home country and I want you participate--you don't need to find it on a map, or have visited or anything, but I just want you to join in on the fun."


And for the most part they'll say "Hey! I can find it on a map and YES I'd love to take part."

Better yet, we can say "Hey, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods...wanna hang out?" and you can usually find a dining companion...


And like many RL communities, word spreads about our joys and our pains. We find little gifts in our mailboxes (real and virtual). We support freely and we are supported unexpectedly.

Most of this without ever meeting each other face-to-face.

Fruit and Nut Granola
adapted from Stonewall Kitchen Favourites

125g rolled oats
55g pinhead oats
50g sweetened shredded coconut
50g sunflower seeds
50g pumpkin seeds
50g whole almonds
35g brown sugar
1tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
½ ginger
75ml maple syrup
60ml oil
1tsp vanilla extract
100g dried fruit

Putting it together

1. Preheat oven to 150C/300F and line a baking tray with foil or parchment
2. Mix all the ingredients together, spread evenly on the prepared tray and pop into the oven for 30-40 minutes. Stir every 10 minutes or so, so the granola doesn't clump together. The granola is ready to come out of the oven when it's a lovely golden colour
3. Remove from oven and put the tray on a cooling rack. Stir once or twice until cool
4. Keeps in an airtight container for up to six weeks.

cheers!
jasmine

There's custard...

...and then there's custard.


I'm not going to sugar coat things or wax too nostalgic about My Darling One: the man was an unwilling cook who relied heavily on Bachelor Chow: big box frozen foods, insta this and canned that. Don't get me wrong: when he did cook from scratch, it was very good -- spaghetti, lasagne, chicken oporto, and I'm told his trifle (I never got to try any as there was never any left for me to try--he took a full bowl to the office at Christmas, and it came back disappointingly empty). Those dishes appeared every so often, but mostly, if he made me a meal, it was usually what is known as Bachelor Chow.


When time came to clean out his pantry, a bachelor friend took much of the BC, a few things were kept (rice, pasta, oatmeal) and the rest was binned. One of the few things I kept was a cannister of Bird's Custard--a staple of the aforementioned trifle.


As someone who's only made...um...real custard, I was curious about this white cornstarchy mix that's famous for transforming into an unnaturally yellow pudding and sauce. I mean, how difficult is it to make custard? (Answer: Not very, as is evidenced by my ability to turn out a pretty yummy vanilla ice cream.).


Well...I made some to go with some individual apple crumbly crispy things.


Would I sound terribly boastful to say my home made custard is yummier--richer, vanilla-ier and, well, oomphier than the powdered purveyance? The colour didn't help matters much--I don't think mine comes anywhere close to that particular shade (unless I dribbled in some colourant).


That's not to say that the cannister will find its way into the bin. I have a few recipes that call for a spoon of custard powder here and there to flavour fillings or cookies...and besides, sometimes truly instant pudding is what a soul needs.

The individual apple crisps were the main point of dessert, no mere vehicle for the sauce. I don't really follow any real recipes when making them: half to a whole tart apple, peeled and sliced, with a spoon of jam or maple syrup in each ramekin.


The topping is really easy (and uses pinhead oats)--this amount was fine for six individual ramekins. Please note I'm pretty free-wheeling when it comes to making this...sometimes there's more flour and less oats, sometimes put spices in sometimes there's barely any butter...it all depends on my mood...and my pantry:


25g plain flour
100g brown sugar
40g rolled oats
15g pinhead oats
50g soft butter (or more, or less, depending on your mood)



Rub the topping ingredients together and spoon over apples before baking.


cheers!
jasmine

Life's a bowl of...

Cherries.

This year I actually tried to document the little cherry tree as it went from flower to fruit.

I'd forgotten it was around until it was in full bloom. The blossoms only lasted a short while, until a giant windstorm left the street blanketed in white petals.

I'd assumed that the storm was so brutal that cherries wouldn't appear. It's not like we ever get a lot of cherries...that is, we don't seem to enjoy many of the little trees fruits. Between the squirrels, birds, chipmunks and the street urchins next door, at most we seem to get is a mediumish bowl of them.

Not this year. I think the street urchins' new tomcat, Taz, has done much to dissuade the creatures (four- and two-legged) from helping themselves. Quite an adorable little butterscotch boy (but then again, most ginger boycats are)...Anyway, the tree fruited beautifully and we've been nibbling on cherries for about two weeks. This week we collected two large carrier bags of mottled, blushing sweet lovelies.

A friend suggested I "do" something with them.

Personally, I think the best thing to "do" with them, is to rinse them and eat them.






cheers!
jasmine

tags: Cherries

add this page to del.icio.us

More on cruise ship bananas

Apparently I was remiss in my last post about the rotten bananas that landed in my possession. Tanna wondered how many cakes I made, since the recipe I posted only used two. And we all know, two bananas doth not a bunch make. I gathered she wanted to know what fate awaited the other bananas. I could have made a layer cake..but, well, that involves frosting and frippery's shadow. I decided to go elsewhere.

Well...what Tanna wants, Tanna gets...or at least I'll satsify her curiosity. :)

The bunch contained five long, ebony bananas. By the time I got home one had... umm... ruptured--probably from jostling around in the trunk while making those manically fast lane changes on the 401. You know, the kind that usually precedes a conversation that includes "Really officer? I was going *that* fast? Oh my." So that left me with four salvageable fruit.

I could have made a banana-mango layer cake, but that means icing...and, well, frippery...and I wasn't in the mood.

So I made a banana-blueberry banana bread. Like me, what it lacks in height (it doesn't rise all that much) it makes up for in personality (tee hee). It started life as a Nigella recipe, but it's been tweaked over the years. I'm sure it started out taller, but but, you know...This is a standard recipe for me--I'll substitute fruit or decide to use vanilla instead of almond. It makes a very nice breakfast (or second breakfast) munchie.

Banana-Blueberry Bread
150g ap/plain flour
1 dspn baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
a good pinch of vanilla salt
110g butter, melted
50g dark brown sugar
2 eggs
2 medium-largish exceedingly ripe bananas, mashed
200g blueberries (frozen is fine)
1/2 tsp almond extract

Preheat oven to 170C/325F and line a 23cm x13cm/9"x5" loaf tin.

Sieve together the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt. In a second bowl, mix together the butter, sugar, eggs, bananas and extract. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in thirds, stirring well after each addition. Fold in the blueberries.

Pour into the tin and bake for 60-75 minutes, or until the top is golden and passes the toothpick test.

cheers!
jasmine

add this page to del.icio.us