winter is coming

Well, rather, autumn is here, and we’re back to more suitable cooking for the season. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen this weekend; I made bread, pizza dough, and peanut butter and choc chip cookies on Saturday (recipes to come, I promise, but I’m still tweaking a bit), and on Sunday I…

a spicy plum crumble

A bit like bananas are in this house, are plums. In that I buy them, but don’t eat them. So there were eight going a bit scrotal in a bowl, and a couple of (very) wizened Bramleys in the veg drawer in the fridge. It was a cold day, Rainageddon was forecast (though didn’t arrived,…

Sunday cooking

I’m desperately trying to make some space in the freezer for the festering season, and also the weather here is utterly vile, so I had a bit of a Reactive day yesterday. Chicken Pudding I had a rather small tub of chicken pie filling – chicken left over from a roast, with bacon and veg…

blackberry and apple crumble

At our old house in Somerset, we had stacks of brambles at the bottom of the garden, and I really do miss them – I must make an effort this weekend to go out and find some blackberries. However, Sainsburys yesterday had a couple of punnets of cultivated blackberries (not at all the same, but…

plum and apple porridgy crumble

We had some plums going scrotal in the fruit bowl, so I cut them in to quarters and destoned them, and put them in an ovenproof dish. They didn’t look enough, somehow, so I got a Bramley out of the fridge and peeled and chopped it, and into the dish it went. Added a drizzle…

supper with friends

We’re frantically busy at the moment, what with house reorganisation, lots of work, and kittens to attend to. The latter had us inviting four friends round for supper and a KittinFest on Saturday. I didn’t really have time for an elaborate meal, and I knew there was a stack of pork steaks in the freezer,…

kiwi fruit and apple crumble

using up: kiwi fruit, windfall apples The veg box from the week before last (!) included four kiwi fruit.  Neither P nor I are enamoured of these little hairy chaps, and the only things people suggested we do with them were pavlova (Pete doesn’t like meringue) or cheesecake, which I couldn’t be bothered to make….

plum (and pear) crumble

Using up: plums and a pear As I’ve mentioned before, we’re not good with fruit.  we buy it, and are full of good intentions, but somehow we don’t actually *eat* it when we should.  So there was a punnet of six lovely golden plums sat by the fruit bowl, *looking* at me.  And a lone…

rhubarb crumble

As always, bits of this are fairly random.  Serves 4 if they’re not overly greedy. Take 3 good sticks of rhubarb, clean, trim, and chop into chunks.  I do mine in different sizes so you get a different texture when it’s cooked.  Some might say this was accidental, but it’s not.  No really. Put into…