weekend cooking

We were due at a Transition Town film meeting on Saturday afternoon, with tea and cake afterwards, so I baked muffins in the morning: I had some brown bananas, and a couple of rather tired clementines, so did a dozen each of clementine and poppyseed, and banana and bran flake. We were greedy, and kept…

Irish potato scones

This is a classic Irish recipe – we used to eat them a lot, but sort of forgot about them; I made some for breakfast this morning, and thought I’d share.  It’s an ideal way to use up leftover boiled potato, too! In a food processor, blitz 6oz cold cooked potato, 4oz flour (I always…

baking and winemaking weekend

Sorted out some wine – filtered and bottled one gallon of parsnip, although the other one went cloudy again, racked the three gallons of rhubarb (which was really 2.5 gallons and racked down to 2 + a bottle), racked the two gallons of apricot and stopped the fermentation, made a gallon of Earl Grey just…

reactive winemaking!

I’m getting the hang of this winemaking lark now, and I’m much more confident than I used to be.  We did our monthly trip to Makro on Saturday (first time the car had been out for a fortnight!), and they had a 5kg bag of carrots reduced to £2.30.   “Wine!”, I thought, and bore…

bread in 5 minutes a day

I read about this book on a friend’s Facebook at the weekend, and a trundle round Google brought forth a recipe, which is here. It seemed too good to be true, and as I was in possession of bread flour and yeast, and a set of American cup measures, I thought I’d give it a…

christmas cake

Rather belatedly, I made our christmas cake last night; I’d normally have done it in November, but what with the move and all … I use a variation on a tried and tested Nigel Slater recipe, and here it is: Prepare a 20cm deep cake pan – grease well, line with a double thickness of…

gooseberry sponge pudding

A friend of mine regularly sells produce from her garden to support the LibDems, and this week she was offering gooseberries.  I bought 10lbs (for a fiver!) – 6lbs have gone to make wine, 2 bags full in the freezer, and the rest I put into a pudding last night. The goosegogs went into a…

banana muffins – late breakfast

banana muffins – late breakfast, originally uploaded by ramtops. Ridiculously easy – I made just half a dozen for breakfast, to use up some ancient bananas. 50g softened butter 90g demerara sugar 1 medium egg 3 small, tired, bananas, peeled 75g natural yoghurt 120g plain flour 1 tsps baking powder 25g wheat flakes 2 tbsp…

muesli flapjacks

I wanted to make a cereal bar – something that Pete could take with him cycling, and I could eat after swimming, for an energy hit.  They’re so ridiculous expensive to buy, and we have muesli sitting in the cupboard uneaten. I googled a bit, and came up with this: I soaked the contents of…

pineapple upside down cake

This always seems to me like a very 80s thing, and indeed I got the recipe from a cookbook printed in 1977 (The Dairy Book of Home Cooking). We had half a pineapple left from making pork and pineapple, and decided an upside down cake would be a good thing to do with it.  It…