52 Cookbooks #37: Apple & Walnut Crumble

September 27, 2014

It's time for more Hugh! I do love a bit of Hugh cooking and I thought I'd already used this book in this challenge, but it seems not - so happy days.

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a new recipe from one of my (many) cookbooks each week for a year...

Infact the real reason I pulled this book - River Cottage Everyday - off the shelf was to remind myself of its apple compote recipe, which in turn I hoped would help me make some headway into the apples I brought back from Norfolk last weekend.

But as I looked for the compote many of the other recipes were screaming "cook me!"

As it turned out I haven't deviated too far from the compote recipe (and I've some of that sitting in the fridge too) with this apple and walnut crumble, but I also used this book for tea last night and cooked liver, sage and onion. Yum.

So as crumbles go, for me it's normally rhubarb (as I grow some in the garden) and a plain crumble. If I make an apple crumble instead that's usually fairly plain too, following the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule of thumb. But for Hugh I decided to make an exception. And I had just the dish for it too:

So breaking from tradition I added ground almonds and porridge oats (substituted for the oatmeal) along with more normal crumble ingredients. I pulsed it all in the food processor and it looked like crumble. So all was good.

I baked the walnuts - yes I actually followed the recipe - well almost, I only had 80g of walnut pieces not the 100g that Hugh said. I peeled, cored and sliced my apples and mixed them with 80g of caster sugar and the walnuts. Hugh says to get the fruit as compact as possible so I did my best with that and then added the souped up crumble.

I left out the optional cinnamon as for a simple crumble girl I decided it was a flavour too far. And I have plenty more time to add cinnamon to apple and crumbles this autumn!

Ready to go into the oven... still looking like crumble!

Out of the oven, still looking good. It cooked for about 40 minutes and still looked like crumble, which is always good news. In the dish and with a splash or two of cream we were very happy (autumnal) bunnies.

The verdict:

It was easy to do, and I might be tempted to make more apple crumbles
I liked the walnuts, but there were a lot of them. I'd only put in 40-50g if I were adding them again.
The oats in the crumble were ok too, but I'm not sure I'd bother with oats and ground almonds again as I thought the crumble was fairly dry
Clearly though I'd be happy to eat any bowl of this put in front of me!

And I bloomin' love Hugh for this line in his recipe - which gives me permission to eat this for breakfast. I guess it's the porridge oats, but that's a good enough reason as any and with Hugh's permission I'm not sure I need that many reasons anyway...

52 Cookbooks #36: Beef in easy tomato sauce

September 20, 2014

Well I missed last week of this challenge - we spent some time in Cornwall and although I had a recipe planned I didn't get a chance to cook it - never mind, I'll either try and catch up or I'll just miss a week and not beat myself up over it. After all, I was on holiday...

This week I've turned to Gok Wan and his Gok Cooks Chinese book. It's a book I've used before with success but not for a while. The recipe I chose - beef in easy tomato sauce - played to my store cupboard ingredients, some home-grown tomatoes and some steak that was in the freezer. The only thing I needed to buy was a humble onion, so nothing too exotic there!

I started by frying the beef until was browned and then swapped it for the onion in the wok. These took on the colour and flavours of the meat and looked like the onions you get in takeaway Chinese, so I was already pleased!

In went the garlic and ginger, closely followed by three of my tomatoes roughly chopped. When the flesh had broken down a bit, in went the chicken stock and it simmered for a few minutes to reduce a little. With that the main sauce ingredients went in a tablespoon of oyster sauce and soy sauce, half a tablespoon of sugar and three tablespoons of tomato ketchup. Yup, that's the easy tomato sauce bit!

It simmered for a couple of minutes before the beef went back in to warm through. It really was that easy. But as we wanted more for dinner, this was then put into the oven so I could wok-fry some vegetables and noodles.

I'd bought one of those plastic boxes of stir-fry veg from M&S so the larger veg went into the wok ahead of the noodles I'd cooked and stirred some sesame oil through. With those softening, warming and sticking to the bottom of the wok the leafier veg went in along with some of the water from the drained noodles. As it was a fairly large box of veg I'd purposely cooked less noodles than usual so the veg to noodle ratio was high. With a splash of soy sauce, we were done, so with chopsticks at the ready we ate...

The verdict

We both liked this dish and would cook it again
I'd definitely use this cookbook again and plan to try some of its other recipes
This dish would be relatively easy to tailor to add veg, perhaps some peppers or some green beans
The sauce was good, but I'd add some chilli next time - either freshly sliced or substituting some chilli sauce for some ketchup

52 Cookbooks #35: Carrot Cake

September 7, 2014

This week I'm back on cake - carrot cake - which is MOH's favourite (apart from Coffee & Walnut cake which I made a while back - see 52 Cookbooks #17: Coffee & Walnut layer cake) and it's from a slightly unusual cookbook. It's a Harry Eastwood book titled Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache, which is a great name for a cookbook!

Underneath the title it says "the ultimate feel-good book of natural cakes that taste naughty" - the difference with this book is the recipes use rice flour and all contain vegetables. So we're pretty used to carrot cake, and even courgette and beetroot in cakes. Potato too isn't unheard of and nor is pumpkin so butternut squash is only a step away... but there's also recipes which include turnip, parsnip and swede - yes, I'm working up to those!

My carrot cake has 280g of finely grated carrot in, which is about 4 medium sized carrots. But first I started by whisking the eggs and muscovado sugar for 5 minutes - definitely one for the food processor then!

To that I added the carrots and some orange zest and mixed those in. Then it was in with the rice flour, baking powder, ground almonds and cinnamon. A splash of vanilla extract and it's almost ready to put into the sandwich tins, all that's left is to stir through sultanas soaked in orange juice and some walnuts (as I didn't have any pecans).

As they went into the oven, they were a pale orange as you'd expect. They cooked for just under an hour at 180 degrees, which seems a long time - but I guess that's the difference with this more unusual cake without butter.

When they came out, they were quite golden. But they came out of the tin easily enough.

They needed to cool completely before I could go anywhere near them with icing. The icing has butter, icing sugar, lime juice and cream cheese - it's still relatively low in fat with only 35g each of butter and cream cheese. So with that made it was time to sandwich and decorate the cake.

It didn't turn out too bad!

The verdict:

This was never going to be a light and fluffy cake, I'm not sure carrot cake ever really is...
The walnut/pecan swap worked well
I'd cook this again and would try other recipes from the book - especially those with beetroot (I've some growing in the garden), pumpkin and courgette.
Unfortunately it's not really a cake for licking the mixing bowl out! I guess that's the lack of butter in the sponge, I guess you can't have everything!
The good thing is that's not the case with the icing - the bowl was definitely worth licking out this time. Happy days.