Food ‘n Drink

Welcome to Food 'n Drink, a personal site about food, drink, cooking and basic gardening / grow your own. Born out of a love of food, I hope this site has something for everyone - Sarah

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Apple, Blackberry and Raspberry Crumble

Continuing my weekend batch cooking today I did 5 double portions of crumble (although only 4 made it to the freezer!). This is really quick and simple to do. I freeze them in foil dishes with the cardboard lids (can get from most kitchen shops and possibly supermarkets too) so that you can take them straight out and cook from defrosted or frozen.

I usually use frozen blackberries and raspberries as I get loads off my parents in the autumn and they’re great for all sorts of desserts.

Ingredients

1 cooking apple
1 dessert apple
3 handfuls of blackberries
2 handfuls of raspberries
100g plain flour
20g brown caster sugar
30g dark muscavado sugar
40g butter or margarine

Method

Peel, core and slice both apples. Put into a large pyrex bowl, add a teaspoon of water and put into the microwave for about 3 minutes to soften the apples. If freezing, divide the apples into foil dishes at this point. Add the blackberries and raspberries.

In a mixer or food processor mix the flour, sugar and butter until fine. If it gets a bit lumpy/gloopy just add a little more flour (this can happen if the butter/margarine is soft). The cover the fruit in the crumble topping.

Cook at 180 degrees celcius for 35 minutes (25-30 minutes for smaller portions). Serve with custard, cream or icecream.

Smoked Haddock Fish Cakes

After watching The Hairy Bikers – Mums Know Best, and seeing them make fish cakes it reminded me that I’d been wanting to try making my own for ages. David always used to say he didn’t like fish cakes as they tasted like hot cotton wool (that’s what he refers to for mash potato!), however I love fish cakes but the tasty ones can cost over £3 for 2!!

So today I decided to give them a go. It was a joint effort and for the first attempt we were quite chuffed with the outcome as they were really nice (“best fish cakes I’ve ever had” from David!). The next plan is to add this to my bulk cooking list, so make up a batch of them and freeze them. At this rate I’ll have a home-made frozen ready meal for every day of the week!

On to the recipe, these are the quantities we used, of course a fillet of fish and two potatoes won’t always weigh in the same ratio, but hey, it’s all cooked and it’s all edible, so adjust the quantities to suit your own tastes :)

Ingredients

1 fillet of smoked haddock, skinned and boned
2 potatoes (aim to have around 50% more of potato than fish)
6 spring onion finely chopped
Grated cheddar cheese
2 eggs
Fresh breadcrumbs (3 slices of white bread blended to breadcrumbs)
Plain flour
Milk
Butter/Margarine

Method

Boil the potatoes, drain and pat dry. Then mash (don’t add any milk or butter!) and allow to cool slightly. Add the spring onion and a few handfuls of grated cheddar and mix into the mash potato. Poach the fish in milk, either in a pan or in the microwave. To use the microwave put the fish into a Pyrex dish, add milk until it’s partially covered, then cover with cling film. Put on high for 3 minutes. Remove fish from dish but keep the milk. Pat the fish dry, flake and fold into the mashed potato mixture along with a beaten egg. Form into round shapes.

Beat the second egg and pour into a bowl. Put the breadcrumbs on a plate and some flour in another bowl. Take each fish cake, dip it in the flour, then in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs. Once they’re all done heat some oil in a frying pan and add the fish cakes. Fry until the breadcrumbs are golden brown all over.

We then put them on a baking tray into the oven on a 150 deg C heat to keep warm (you may need higher if you don’t have a fan oven).

Then I also made a simple cheese sauce to go with them by melting about a teaspoon of butter in a saucepan, adding about 2 teaspoons of flour, mixing it in to the melted butter, then the milk from the pyrex dish and a couple of handfuls of cheese. Sorry, no real measurements as I just go by the consistency and taste, but all good cookbooks should tell you how to make a simple cheese sauce.

These quantities made 6 large fish cakes in total :)

Using a Heated Propagator

Today I finally got my heated propagator, ready to get my seeds going earlier than usual. You may wonder why I would start a couple of months earlier than the packets suggest. My reason is that in the last few years in the UK the best period of long warm/hot weather seems to be around April/May time. If we start growing from seed in March then some plants won’t be ready for planting until May, and you can potentially miss the best weather of the year!

So, after winning some vouchers for a local garden centre, we finally took a trip over there today and I got a decent sized heated propagator (photos to follow once it’s set up!), plus a few packets of seeds designed for the compact/patio garden. I bought seeds for dwarf beans (I’ve grown these the last two summers in a pot), cherry tomatoes (going to put these in a hanging basket), spring onions, baby carrots and baby leeks. Plus I’ll be seeing if my existing seeds (courgettes, lettuce, radish and rocket) are still ‘working’.

My plan this year is to stick with the pots and growbags, as there is no ground space to put plants in. I’m also planning to do a couple of troughs of potatoes, using a couple of deep wooden troughs built by my Dad (from old scrap wood, no expense spared!). That, plus the pots and two wooden troughs I already have, plus maybe 3 growbags and I think we should get a nice little crop of vegetables and salad this year :)

Potato, Bacon and Leek Soup

It’s extremely cold here in the UK at the moment (coldest winter for over 30 years apparently), so what better way to warm yourself up than to have a lovely bowl of homemade soup! I often cook up chicken soup however I fancied a change and to make something a bit more filling, so I adapted a sweetcorn soup recipe and made a dozen portions of this to cool and freeze for lunches over the next couple of weeks :)

The soup is great for a base and for freezing. Then when you want to eat it you can just add in some fresh vegetables and/or a bit of extra meat such as cooked chicken, bacon or prawns.

Ingredients

1 teaspoon of butter
2 large potatoes sliced
1 medium onion chopped finely
1 leek, chopped
3 rashers of streaky bacon, chopped
1 pint / 268ml of chicken stock
150g of frozen sweetcorn
700ml of milk
1 tablespoon of corn flour

Method

Fry the onions and bacon in the butter in a large/tall sauce pan until the onions are soft. Add the potatoes, leek and stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15-20 minutes until the potatoes are soft (you can add in a chopped celery too at this point if you want to). Blend the corn flour with the milk and add that plus the sweetcorn to the pan and stir well. Bring to the boil and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Blend the soup with a hand blender. Mix in some seasoning to suit your own taste.

For freezing: put the soup into freezable containers and allow to cool before freezing.

For eating: put the soup into a saucepan and add some sweetcorn plus either some prawns, chopped bacon or chicken (all already cooked, but can be cold). Add some extra veg such as peas or leek if you wish.

It’s pretty simple but it’s quite filling and it’s great on a cold winters day :)

Growing Garlic

I first grew my own garlic a few years ago, and had mixed success (mainly due to the position of the garlic I think). For the last two winters I’ve not really had the motivation to do much in the garden, but this year I’ve decided to try growing some garlic in a wooden trough I have that my Dad made earlier in the year for me to grow french beans in. It’s nothing massive, about 8-10 inches deep (16-20 cm) a foot long and half a foot wide (30cm by 15cm, roughly). I’ve planted about 6 cloves so hopefully that’ll give me 6 bulbs of garlic next June/July.

If you want to try growing your own then whilst it is a little bit later than the ideal time, you can still get them planted, but do it as soon as possible! Ideally you should buy specific garlic for growing from your local garden centre, but you can use normal garlic cloves, however the results may not produce large sized bulbs, but it’s still a good way to try it.

You need to plant them about half a foot to a foot apart (although I cheated, but we’ll see how they fare) and about an inch under the surface. You don’t need to ‘unwrap’ the clove, just make sure the pointed end is pointing upwards. Then you can just leave them until about the end of June or early July.

I’ll keep you updated on how mine go :)

One little fact, the colder the winter, the stronger the growing garlic will be!

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