ramtops

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 the bag home in triumph, along with 96 cans of cat fud and other essentials.

5kgs is a *lot* of carrots, I may tell you, but Pete and I topped and tailed them and chopped them up, and then I boiled them up in my preserving pan (bought from eBay a couple of years ago, and so useful).  We had to do it them in two batches.  You want the liquor for wine, and the carrots can be repurposed for eating.

I had a little ham hock in the freezer, and I put it in the slow cooker yesterday before I went out.  So, in a serendipitous style, I had a load of nice ham stock for soup.  One half of the Jordan carrot mountain went through the Magimix and into a big pan with the stock, and that’ll be this week’s soup, or the start thereof.  And I have some coriander to go with it, which will be nice.

The other batch of carrot will be liquidised and, somehow, shoehorned into th freezer for another soup.  I really can’t get used to living with just one freezer, and it’s always full to bursting, with me wanting to cook still more.

I have a big batch of Gujuerati beef curry in the slow cooker right now, and space will have to be found for that too … I’ll write the recipe up tomorrow.

And there are cheese scones and some cocktail sossidges in the oven for supper …

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

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 greaseproof paper, with the sides lined to above the top by a couple of inches.

Amass 1kg of dried fruit – I used figs, prunes, apricots, dates, raisins and sultanas, as that was what was in the baking box, and cut it into small pieces.  This is tedious, but I didn’t bother so much last year, and it wasn’t as nice.

Cream 250g butter and 250g brown sugar together – I used about half and half dark muscovado and demerara.  Beat until it’s light and fluffy, or as light and fluffy as it can be with muscovado in it ..

Add three eggs one by one – don’t worry, it will curdle, probably.

Add 65g of ground almonds, and 100g of shelled hazelnuts, 3 tablespoons of alcohol (recipe says brandy, but I generally use whiskey, and this year I used good bourbon!), zest and juice of an orange, half a teaspoon of baking powder, and 250g of plain flour.  And the fruit.

My mixer always gives up at this point and I have to fold it all together by hand.

Put it in the tin, cook for one hour at gas mark 3, then 1.5 hours at gas 2 – don’t open the oven to prod it until the end.  Leave to cool in the tin, then wrap tightly in foil, and feed it with more alcohol every few days.

We eat as is, as we don’t much like icing.  Merry Christmas!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

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 milk

Hurl everything except the wheat flakes in the food processor and blitz. Add the wheat flakes and pulse so they’re broken up, but not powdered.

Put in a 6 cup muffin pan (I always use a silicon one), bake for 25 minutes at 190˚ C. Leave to cool in the pan until hunger overcomes you.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

but I'm quite pleased with this - it' s a work in progress, but it's coming along nicely.

it has a sort of amateur charm, don't you think?

today, I have been mostly baking. I made a fabulous gruyere and cracked peppercorn bread. Or, at least, it would have been fabulous had I had a decent loaf tin instead of the ancient old things I use. It wasn't /quite/ cooked through, but we toasted it, and it was delicious.

and I made some shortbread bikkies, and cut them out with my festering xmas tree and star cutters. And I made some walnut shortbread, and cut them out ditto, except the recipe said to leave the dough in the fridge for half and hour,and I left it in there for about 5 hours, and had to soften it all up again. But they're out of the oven now, and they're gorgeous. I'm going to bung a bit of icing and some glittery balls [fnaar] on the shortbreads tomorrow.

tomorrow - marzipan the cake, have a bash at sausage rolls {dear god - pastry; I can't do pastry ...), maybe some banana muffins.

I got Pete to drive me up to the Kitchen Shop this afternoon (I can't park the Thaab, try as I might) and bought two new loaf tins, and another heavy duty baking tray - now I'm doing lots of this stuff, I want better quality tins, cos it makes all the difference.

and we called in at the local off licence on the way home and picked up 26 bottles of wine (including some vintage Pelorus - hurrah, and some pink fizz just for kalunina. There are six assorted bottles of fizz on the top row of the wine rack, which should do us through to next year.)

now I'm sitting here while perlmonger cooks me a lump of Dexter steak before settling down to the X-Factor (which the Tivo is recording.

all recipes are on Nibblous, should you be interested.