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...