Allotment crops – freezer to plate

This is a really wonderful cake (or pudding) which I make for the winter days when we’ve been out on the allotments and we’re frozen and starved when we get home. It’s very easy, very substantial and has the taste of summer. It’s good enough to serve for a dinner party pudding, and robust enough to hand slices to any horny handed son of the soil who normally turns up his nose at ‘fancy’ food – and I find there are quite a few of that type, in allotmentland! It uses blackberries from the freezer, which we harvest off our plot (thornless, sweet and very large) and mix with wild brambles (thorny, small and tart) to get the perfect combination of juicy sweetness and tangy flavour. It's also very easy.

Cake
120g butter or margarine
120g sugar
2 large eggs
120g plain flour
200g blackberries

Rumble (it should be called crumble, but the boy called it rumble when he was a toddler and it’s been rumble in our house ever since)
60g butter or margarine
50g plain flour
100g sugar
50g oats

Preheat oven to 18ºC/gas 4. Grease and bottom line a 500g loaf tin, using greaseproof paper which rises up the narrow sides over the top (this allows you to lift your cake out at the end of cooking without disturbing the topping)

Place the fat in a mixing bowl. Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating in well with each addition. Fold in flour. Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, spreading to the edges. Top with the blackberries. Place the remaining flour in a bowl. Add the remaining fat and rub until the absorbed and the mixture resembles crumbs. Mix in the sugar and oats to end up with a fairly loose dry mixture

Sprinkle this mixture over the blackberries, spreading it out evenly but not pressing it down

Bake for 45-50 minutes until golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before turning out. Great hot or cold, or with yoghurt for breakfast or warmed slightly with a cup of tea when you come in from a day’s heavy digging.

Labels: allotment-blackberries, allotment-cooking, allotment-crops, allotment-freezer

Allotment skills - using stuff up

This is one of the rare bones of contention in our allotment life. I mentioned it in my last post, and it’s the horrible fact of the glut. There’s nothing you can do about a glut – try as you might to avoid one, if you have seven kilos of courgettes to use up, you can bet that there are another seven waiting in the wings, and that your neighbours will be moaning about the tendency of the average courgette to hide under the leaves and turn itself into a thin-skinned marrow, regardless of your desire to never see another marrow or courgette again.

Marrow jam, courgette bake, marrow rum, courgette chutney, stuffed marrow, stuffed courgette, marrow bread, courgette flower fritters (a brilliant idea, stops the plants growing any more courgettes, for one thing!), marrow stew … it just goes on and on and life can become insufferable when tomatoes, or strawberries, or rhubarb or whatever suddenly go into glut production. And that’s why I rely on Grow Organic, Cook Organic to kick-start my kitchen creativity. I found it useful when last year’s rhubarb glut overwhelmed me – the recipe for Rhubarb and Ginger Ice-cream was a revelation because ‘the boy’ who has never knowingly eaten rhubarb, actually consumed gallons of the stuff and brought home his teenage friends to consume it too! Some of the recipes might seem a bit high-falutin’ such as Red Onion and Mushroom Tartlets with Goat’s Cheese, but it’s worth giving them a try because they really are designed to work with home grown fruit and veg.

Labels: allotment-cooking, allotment-fruit, allotment-glut

Back to the slow cooker

I’ve been watching with interest as Fiona, over at The Cottage Smallholder gets to grips with her slow cooker. I swear by mine! One of the easiest, and money-savingist recipes I make in it is breakfast cereal. The Americans call this granola (pshaw!) and we’d probably call it muesli, if we called it anything, but we tend to just keep it in a big airtight box and call it breakfast!

What’s it got to do with allotments?

Well quite a lot really. When I first made it, I used this recipe, which is American, and because I had no idea that a ‘cup’ was a metal or glass receptacle, something like a funnel, that has hundreds of markings on the side to allow Americans to measure ingredients accurately, I just grabbed a mug and measured my stuff that way. It worked just perfectly, and although I do now have a real measuring cup for American recipes, I still make this with a mug.

4 cups rolled oats
2/3 cup honey
1 cup bran
1 cup wheatgerm
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower oil

Combine all ingredients in the slow cooker. Cook on low heat with lid slightly ajar about 4 hours, stirring occasionally. Cool and store in airtight jar. Use within 1 to 2 weeks.

Hmm. Good, but not perfect.

What we do now is all the above, cook for five hours with the wooden spoon left in the pot to keep the lid ajar and the timer set to remind me to stir it every hour and a half or so. But we also tend to add to the cooking mix, any of the following:

--dried blueberries from the allotment
--dried apple slices from the allotment
--chopped walnuts (okay, not exactly from the allotment, but from the walnut trees in a local park, which nobody else seems to harvest)
--hazelnuts, from Bert’s allotment hedge, when he can spare some

Which turns a good cereal into an absolute delight. Great with yoghurt in summer, or hot milk in winter. Mixed with some melted butter and golden syrup it makes flapjacks, and with some butter and flour rubbed together with a bit of sugar, makes a healthy crumble mix for pulpy apple gluts if I can’t be bothered to make apple butter.

We don’t dry much fruit, but I once owned a big mesh thingummibob that was supposed to be used to dry cashmere sweaters flat by being laid over a bath. When I gave up wearing cashmere, we realised that we could use the thingummy to dry fruit by cutting it into small even sized portions, laying it on the mesh and drying it in the airing cupboard.

So we eat this luxury breakfast cereal, which is salt-free and made exactly to our own taste, for the price of a few pence, and every few weeks I make up another batch, varying the additions according to what’s in the jars above the sink, and I feel very virtuous about it.

Labels: allotment-cooking, allotment-recipes, allotment-slow-cooker

Allotment, freezer and one other thing …

A slow cooker is a countertop electrical home appliance that is used to cook stews and other dishes containing water at relatively low temperatures, with correspondingly long cooking times (several hours). Many recipes simply call for the ingredients to be put in the cooker with little preparation. The slow cooker can then safely be left to run unattended, making it a convenient cooking method. So says Wikipedia, anyway.

What I say is that if you are a frugal person – you grow your own veg, you use your freezer to store your gluts, and you hate waste, then buy a slow cooker to finish the process! If you have an allotment, you can put dinner on in the morning and come home to a piping hot meal, all for the cost of leaving a light on. A casserole for six costs as much (or as little) to cook as a bowl of soup for one, so I make big batches and freeze the excess.

A couple of points:

1. Cooking on the low heat setting generally takes about twice the time of high heat, but for cheap cuts of meat or root veg, I allow at least three to four times.

2. If you have economy 7 type tariff electricity, you can cook overnight for literally pennies

3. When adapting ‘normal’ recipes, remember that because there is no evaporation during cooking, there may be excess liquid in your dish at the end of the cooking time. If so, drain it into in a small saucepan and simmer until it has reduced to an appropriate amount. It's important to add seasonings after this reduction takes place, since reducing the liquid will intensify the taste.

I use mine for soups, stews, chutneys (wonderful for these, as they can cook down for eight to ten hours and then just need a quick boil in the big saucepan to reduce any excess liquid, also it seems to speed up the maturation of a chutney to start it off in the slow cooker, so you can open the jar about a month before a standard chutney would be ready), chilli con carne, gammon (cook with apple juice or cider, wonderful!) … in fact there’s almost nothing that comes off the allotment that doesn’t end up in there, sometime or other.

Pot roast in slow cooker by basykes.

Labels: allotment-cooking, slow-cooker