Autumn and sunshine

Mixed apple jelly

Autumn is definitely here, the trees are turning fantastic colours and starting to drop leaves in droves which is several weeks earlier than last year when I began to think the leaves would just gradually die on the trees and not give us any show at all ! We had a very wet and prolonged spring this year and so the summer growing season has seems very short. However the last few days have included some really quite hot spells so the sunshine isn't quite over yet !

I hope to use the next few weeks to get the allotment up to speed so come the spring we don't need to be doing lots prep to start planting with our clay soil we need to prepare in advance as it's to sticky to work when very wet!

The slugs eat all the winter brassicas I tried to plant but I have shallots, onions and garlic to put in to replace them and some broad beans and peas which can over winter as well. Plus various things that can be started in the greenhouse and coldframes.

For now though it is a season of using up as many apples as I can get for free ! I don't have apple trees that give me fruit as yet but several people I know do and I also know several places they grow on waste land so I really need to get out and grab some more while they are still available.

I do have some already which we have been eating fresh and I have made lovely apple jelly as you can see in the photo above. I have a few more jars but that was as many as I was risking carry outside so I could show you to glow through them! It is mixed apple jelly because it has four different types of apple in it including the few crab apples from our tree. I basically used all the apples that didn't look like they would last long plus some cooking apples.

This weeks theme from the celiac family blog for the gluten free menu swap is potatoes, something I will definitely use this week. We are still digging them from the allotment though we need to get the last ones up and stored before the ground gets to damp and cold.

So the menu

Monday - As I didn't do it last week. Braised Lamp shoulder with greens and Anya potatoes straight from the ground (very nice they were to)

Tuesday - Not sure Mum is coming to visit so it depends what we end up doing.

Wednesday -Potato bake. Potatoes layered with tomatoes (from our greenhouse) and covered in a egg and milk mix with a little cheese.

Thursday - Rice and Stuff. Basically our version of something similar to fried rice, rice with lots of bits added to it to make a one pot meal.

Friday -Dosas or salmon and veg if I fail to make the Dosa

Baking - Pear and raisin muffins, cheese scones.
Fermenting - I want to have a go at Dosas which includes fermenting the mix first. Make Sauerkraut and start a batch of ginger beer.  Can you tell I've finally got the book Wild Fermentation which I've been considering for ages :)  All these things I was planning to try anyway but it's just that extra push to do so.

Weekly Menu Swap - Hosting Ingredient - Suet

I realise that many people will probably never knowingly have used suet and indeed suet recipes seem to be mainly British dishes but the actual ingredient is available anywhere that cows and sheep are eaten. Why? Because it is the fat from around the internal organs.. OK I know at this point some of you are thinking that's gross but really it's not much different to using dripping or similar. Suet has the properties of being quite flaky in nature, having a low melting point and producing a very distinctive pastry among other things. There is also a vegetarian version though that might be hard to get in none suet using areas.. OK it's not probably something you want to use every day but there are some traditional winter dishes here which don't work without it.

To be fair much of it doesn't get used at least not by butchers these days as my previous post will show, I got a large amount for free of my butcher as he normally asks the abattoir to remove it before sending him the meat.. it's crumbly nature means the cool-room floor gets covered in bits otherwise. Now the abattoir might well have a use for it other than sending to a butcher.. You can certainly buy it in packets but it is coated in flour after it is grated to keep the bits separate so it is no good for me.  It is also used a lot over here to make fatballs to put out for wild birds by combining it with seeds and other bits they like, it makes a good high calorie food for them. Traditionally it was rendered down to make tallow for candles too, very smoky candles for the masses who couldn't afford beeswax! .

So what recipes use it? Well Christmas pudding for a start and mincemeat, this is probably partly because mincemeat at least used to have meat in it.. I once made a traditional mincemeat with minced meat in it and apart from having to keep the mince pies in the fridge they really tasted no different to the none meat version which keeps for at least a year in a jar!

It is also used in suet pastry which is used in suet puddings.. these are savoury puddings ie steamed in a pudding basin, normally an outside of pastry with a pie type filling or even a plain sponge pudding type one to serve with meat a bit like Yorkshire pudding is . There are also sweet suet puddings eaten for pudding such as spotted dick and jam suet pudding... Have you noticed we like the word pudding over here  :)   I'm planning a meat filled suet pasty style pudding this week.

Delia's suet pastry
Bacon and leek suet pudding from Farmers Weekly
Plain suet pudding from The Foody
Spotted Dick from the Jane Austin Centre
Jam spong pudding from Cook it Simply

It's also used in dumplings to put in a stew for the last 20 mins or so of the cooking time which are a firm favourite here. Dumplings are very easy.. they are basically twice as much flour as fat and whatever flavours you like such as herbs, onion, cheese or whatever goes with the stew.


Basic dumplings from The Foody
A version from Jamie Oliver for those who don't have suet

I posted some links to Christmas pudding recipes a couple of weeks ago and will post up my gluten free, corn free, citrus free version when I have finished trialling it..

Here are a couple of mincemeat recipes, mincemeat is easy to make and once made you can make another British Christmas staple the mincepie. There are plenty of other uses for mincemeat too as you can see here.

Delia's version.
A meat version from River Cottage
 
Anyway that is probably more about Suet than you ever wanted to know so on to the menus.

Our menu this week.

Monday - Suet meat pudding with potatoes, cabbage and carrots.

Tuesday - Fish pie

Wednesday - School play so something simple like baked potatoes we can have quickly.

Thursday - Cauliflower cheese.

Friday - Stew and dumplings.

Baking and other batch cooking- Chrismas puddings, Banana bread, banana chukney, banana curd, banana steamed pudding.. (well I do still have about 16lb of bananas to use up! )

Other Menus

Heather over at Celiac Family has just got back from a surprise trip to Disney World the lucky thing, she has a lovely sounding menu plan though she tells us it is quite simple due to the hectic time of year !

Angela at Angela's Kitchen does use suet even if only to make fat balls for the birds ! her menu so based on some deals her hubby picked up which is the sort of menu I love. her Thai seasoned patties sound particularly interesting.

Cheryl from Gluten free goodness  has a lovely photo of her cats all curled up to greet us. She has a very interetsing sounding menu and she may never have heard of suet but then I have no idea what mahi or kalamatas are so we are even !  

Bargins on the high Street

I am very much a supporter of buying locally and I have been trying to support my local shops more recently rather than defaulting to the supermarket. I do still buy some things in the supermarket but we now get vegs from the allotment, a veg box every other week from a local organic shop and any extras from a couple of very good veg shops on the local high street. In fact in easy walking distance we have at least 4 shops with a good range of veg, some more traditional English, some quite Asian oriented.

We get milk delivered by a milk man and the local bread shop is great and we have noticed their prices have not gone up nearly as much as the supermarket so now they are on a par was as not so long ago they were noticeably more expensive.

I am also trying to buy most meat from the local butcher and having had some fantastic beef from him has really brought home how bland the supermarket stuff can be.. he also happily caters to my wims making me gluten free sausages to my specs and even getting me suet when I ask.. It turns out they normally have the abattoir throw the suet away before delivering the carcase as they have no use for it so as a result I got it for free! I got about 5lb, which I'm guessing is one cows worth, of which the picture show about a pounds worth.. Its' quite flaky fat though in this raw form you do have to separate the fat from the surrounding membrain but it means I can make proper chirstmas pub well a gluten free 'proper' one anyway.

The other big bargain of the week was bananas! I stopped at the newest of our veg shops to buy a couple of bags of bananas to make chutney as our current favourite is banana based and spotted that while the bags were a good price they had a big heaped box full of slightly brown ones marked up for 1.99 for the box !! As the recipe calls for very ripe bananas that seemed like a plan!  In all there was 28lb of bananas in the box so that's about 7p a pound!!

Actually turns out most aren't too ripe for eating straight either so the smallest having recovered from his illness earlier in the week has been stuffing himself with them and they are great as fritters to!

Pears and this weeks menu

I never did go scrumping due to Jakey dieing and as it is half team this week we can't go this week either as the area isn't really safe for small people even if it's just the nettles being too high. However before school finished I did get round to picking some of the pears with a few of the kids. There are still huge numbers on the tree though and after the first dish with them i want to go and get a whole bunch more. Unfortunately I can't give them to the kids unless they have a signed letter from their parents agreeing! This will be done when we get the veg garden up and running but has not been done yet so the pears are going begging. If I do pick a bunch more I think the teachers will get some goodies at least! I don't want them going rotten like they did last year if I can help it seems such a waste.

We decided the pears are really cooking pears and indeed they poached wonderfully as the picture above shows. I poached them in a sugar and water mix with some spiced winter fruits cordial by Belvoir added. I served them with vanilla cream for the young ones using some new vanilla extract we just got which is fabulous.

For the adults I made crème brulle, actually the smalls got some the next day it was just to late in the day for them the night before by the time they were made. As you can see from the picture they had a bit of a skin on them straight out of the oven but it was easily removed. Next time I will cook them a little lower I think.

One with a skin, one without.

Anyway on to the menu. As it is half term I will just list the dishes I plan rather than specific days as that will depend on weather and what we end up doing each day. I treated myself to a couple of recipe magazines so a few dishes might be from those too. I got Donna Hay which I hear much about but very rarely see here and Country Kitchen which is a British seasonal based cooking magazine but haven't finished reading yet..

I also picked up some frozen gluten free pastry I've never tried before so watch this space.

1) Baked Potatoes with various fillings

2) Fish pie with sweet potato topping.

3) Polenta terrine from Donna Hay

4) Pear and feta pie.

5) Veg stew with suet dumplings.

This weeks gluten free menu swap is hosted by Celiac Family and the chosen ingredient is cilantro which we call coriander. I do like coriander and might get some from the local Indian shop as a coriander pesto might go very well with the terrine. Go there to check out more gluten free menus.

There are also a lot more menus, some gluten free at Menu plan money at Organized Junkie.

perserving and alcohol

I have made a second batch of the wonderful banana based chutney, though actually the jar in the picture is the first batch not the second, the only one left already so you can see why I made more.

I also picked some blackberries and collected some windfall damsons so have put the damsons in gin and the blackberries in vodka to make liqueurs, with sugar of course.. it will be a few months before i report back on those. I also have some sloes in the freezer which will go in gin. The sloes may have been picked a bit early but everything is very early this year and they seemed ripe.

I have also made blackberry and apple crumble and muffins so we have had plenty to eat too!

Before our allotment open day this weekend I investigated the interior of the abandoned allotments next to the current used ones for apples, if you look on one of the aerial maps such as this one you will see there are a lot of un-used plots and there used to be more, the tip (the buildings on the left) were once allotments too as was the industrial estate off to the right and there are more that were in operation till very recently going up to the north, you can see that start of them in the top middle of the picture.

We have been given permission to re-open the plots between the used ones and the railway as we now have a waiting list of people wanting plots, the triangle above the plots but they have been digging bore holes in the rest of it to see if they can build a new incenirator there. Needless to say we, and the local residences are not impressed. Even if you think an incinorator is a good idea, this one is to cover Coventry, Warwickshire and Solihull, so why they can't find some land that isn't both in an urban lived in area AND green belt I don't know.. the one that is currently there is soon to be decommisoned and the access isn't as good as it would be if they resited to somewhere out of the city on a major trunk road but that would mean being in Warwickshire where the population get to veto such things.. Can you tell I'm not impressed with our councils railroading tactics and the fact two other areas are willing to dump their rubbish on us! I don't call Coventry the black-hole of the area for nothing we get all the bad stuff and none of the good that the surrounding areas get.

Anyway rant over, currently the bore hole making has left big tracks through the old allotments making fruit picking easier so I will be going back to get more apples and such.. and yes Mark if you are reading this I will take someone with me we can carry more that way :)

Late posted Daring Cheesecake

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

I even finished the recipe days before the posting date and then couldn't post as I had no internet access, it just went off Saturday afternoon and even two hours on the phone to my provider got me nowhere.. in fact I am only back on now because I have changed providers!

Well better late than never I suppose, I hate being without internet.. going on holiday is different but losing it when you don't expect it just throws everything out. Yes I know I shouldn't depend on it but I keep so much information on my gmail account or|I check blogs and on line recipe sites rather than printing out lots of paper that when it goes down I suddenly find i don't have the information I needed to hand. It also brought home to me I might be wise to get a few more friends phone numbers not just their emails :)

Anyway on to the challenge recipe. This gave me the chance to make Graham crackers for the first time.. gluten free of course. I could have used a different base but I've been meaning to try making them for ages. I'm told that they are the same as what we call digestives.I used Cake and Commerce's recipe which worked very well you can find it here.
The only changes I made was to sub chestnut flour for the sweet brown rice flour and brown rice flour instead of Rice Bran Flour. We really liked the biscuits though to me they tasted a little too toffee like and were a bit to brittle rather than crumbly to be digestives.. I think if I try them again I might use a little less brown flours and possibly a lighter sugar as I think that is what gave the toffee flavour. All that said they made a fantastic base for the cheese cake and for that, rather than dunking in tea, I'd probably make them just like this lot again.So on to the cheesecake itself everything else is gluten free so I followed the recipe directly apart from the fact that I added crystallised ginger in the base. You can find the recipe just as we were given it for the challenge at the bottom of this post. Abbey is a good friend of Jenny and a well known cheesecake expert. She certainly makes a good cheesecake recipe as this one is really nice. This is the first time I think I've ever had a cooked cheesecake that rivaled the ones my aunt used to make for family get-togethers and that is praise indeed.

The topping I added is a simple rhubarb purée. I LOVE rhubarb and we got some in our organic veg box just as I was making the cheesecake so it was an obvious choice and went well with the creamy cheesecake top and the dark and gingery base.


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Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake:

crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs
1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. vanilla extract (or the innards of a vanilla bean)
1 tbsp liqueur, optional, but choose what will work well with your cheesecake

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4 = 180C = Moderate heat). Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.

2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too - baker's choice. Set crust aside.

3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.

4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.

5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done - this can be hard to judge, but you're looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don't want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won't crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.

Pan note: The creator of this recipe used to use a springform pan, but no matter how well she wrapped the thing in tin foil, water would always seep in and make the crust soggy. Now she uses one of those 1-use foil "casserole" shaped pans from the grocery store. They're 8 or 9 inches wide and really deep, and best of all, water-tight. When it comes time to serve, just cut the foil away.

Prep notes: While the actual making of this cheesecake is a minimal time commitment, it does need to bake for almost an hour, cool in the oven for an hour, and chill overnight before it is served. Please plan accordingly!

Wot no buns?

Ok you probably need to be a certain age to get that title and I didn't pose him he just did it himself !

Anyway on to the buns or muffins or cakes whatever you would like to call them. I was pointed to this recipe for fruit and veg muffins on 5dollardinners.com by a post on the gluten free recipe group and we have made them twice now with different fruit each time.

The recipe is very simple and easy to make and is based on a cup of pureed fruit and/or veg. We did peach and pear the first time and this batch are mango and banana. I can see them becoming a regular thing any time we have fruit that needs eating up as have a couple of family members who are a bit picky about fruit being unblemised and so perfectly good fruit can sit about for ages and not get eaten unless it's by me!

Do try them they are very good little cakes, not to sweet and nice and light texture wise. Plus a great way to sneak some fruit and veg towards their five a day into people's diets !