ramtops

Sep. 7th, 2010

Here’s the forecast for Kingston-upon-Hull for the next few days – not really what you might call an Indian Summer, is it? Pete and I both have a Lurgy, so soup is called for.

Last night I Magimix’d four carrots, a courgette and a leek; the food processor does well with the first two veg with its chopping blade, but it really doesn’t like leeks, so I had to fish out the big bits and chop them by hand. Dumped all the veg in the slow cooker with some olive oil and left them on low for a few hours.

Pete then had to get out of bed to turn the slow cooker off, as we’d forgotten it …

This morning, I dumped in about 1.5 pints of goulash stock from the weekend, together with assorted bits of veg and beans and pork, about 2.5 pints of boiling water, and a mug of lentils, and hopefully it will make a rather nice soup by lunchtime.

This is what’s known in this household as mongrel soup, and generally is far finer than any contrived soup recipe I’ve tried :)

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/the-crimewave-that-shames-the-world-2072201.html – Robert Fisk on “honour killings”.

Read it and weep. I did.

Mirrored from kestrel.org.

I run a community recipe site called Nibblous, and if you Google for banana cake, you’ll find my friend Jaqui’s recipe is the number one hit, which I’m quite pleased about! I’ve long used a similar recipe to that myself for banana cake, but I’ve refined it quite a bit over the years, and I change it around almost every time I make it.

I’m a fairly recentlly diagnosed Type 2 diabetic, and I try to avoid white flour, so I thought I’d have a bash at a wholemeal banana cake.

6oz wholemeal flour
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
4 ripe bananas – the riper, the better
4oz butter or margarine
4.5oz granulated sugar
a good grate of nutmeg
2 eggs
a generous teaspoon of vanilla essence

Now, I’m lazy – I do this in a food processor. I start with the bananas and whizz them up till they’re all mashed, then I bung in everything else, whizz some more, and it’s done. If you don’t have a food processor, or want to do it the long way round, see Jacqi’s recipe above for mashing and creaming and folding :)

Decant into a well greased 2lb loaf tin (I always cheat and use those pan liners which I get from Lakeland – less trouble) and bake for 40 minutes at gas 4, then 30 minutes at gas 2. Leave to cool in the tin, or if you’ve used a liner, then it comes straight out with no hassle and you can cut a test slice pretty quickly :)

I always double it up and make two cakes, as they freeze remarkably well.

I was really pleased with this wholemeal version – it’s slightly nutty, and the nutmeg was a new addition this evening, and it worked really well.

You can bung anything in this – chocolate pieces, mixed spice, currants, chopped apple, walnuts; it’s a really great basic cake recipe.