Pumpkin Cake

Do you remember the monster pumpkin we were so kindly given at the beginning of November? I'm sure it was left on our plot for Hallowe'en, but we didn't pick it up until a few days later, so it was too late to carve into a lantern. Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

We kept it - pumpkins store very well as long as they are not damaged and are kept cool and safe from rodents. Ours stored on top of the fridge for over 2 months, and then one day last week I cut it up and made it into lots of pumpkin puree and froze it in batches.

What will the puree be used for? Well pumpkin soup is an obvious possibility. There are lots of good recipes here - my favourite is the coconut chili and pumpkin soup. I also make a cracking pumpkin pie. But recently I've found some more surprising uses for pumpkin. For one thing, I found a recipe for a delicious moist cake made with pumpkin (pictured) which all the children will eat! It has vegetables in it, but they eat it anyway. God bless Harry Potter, that's what I say. And I've invented pumpkin griddle cakes. They're scrummy. So scrummy in fact that I'm quite relieved the kids won't countenance them - that leaves more for Ed and me.

Pumpkin Griddle Cakes
Simmer 1lb pumpkin pieces in a little water, strain and lightly mash with a fork. Make sure you strain them well, squeezing a bit if need be to remove excess water. Melt 2oz butter into the mashed pumpkin and mix well. Mix salt, pepper and grated nutmeg into the buttery pumpkin mash, then stir in 4oz wholemeal plain flour. This makes a sort of sticky dough. Heat a frying pan and grease it with a little butter. Using your fingers make a few walnut-sized pieces of pumpkin dough and drop them onto the frying pan. Fry until golden on one side (only about a minute if the pan is hot enough) then turn over, and squash them down a bit with the back of a spatula to make flattened cakes about 1/4" or so thick. Fry until golden on that side, then remove from the pan and keep them warm whilst you cook the remaining batches of pumpkin griddle cakes. Serve hot.

Duck Soup

Don't tell me you threw away the carcass of your duck/goose/turkey or whatever? What about the hambone? Oh no, you didn't did you? Well keep this recipe in a safe place for next year, so you can enjoy the best home-made soup you've ever tasted. It makes a big batch, but it freezes beautifully so if you can't eat it all straight away freeze some in individual portions. Then bring it out when you want to impress visitors, or better still bring it out when you have a stinking cold or just the January/February blues. It will cheer you up no end.

Duck Soup

Take your biggest pan (it needs to be a whopper) and set it on the stove. Attack your bird carcass with a meat cleaver and hack it into bits that will fit in the pan. It can be just two or three big sections if your pan is big enough. Include anything that is stuck to the carcass, any leftover bits of meat or skin, the gravy and jelly it exuded onto the plate, the orange you stuffed inside it (you mean you don't stuff an orange inside your duck before roasting it? Oh you really must try it, or a lemon if you're roasting chicken). Cover it with water and turn on the heat. Now add to the pan a few vegetables to add to the stock - Just rummage about in the cupboards and see what you can find. A carrot, an onion, a leek, a couple of bits of celery, whatever you've got, but nothing starchy like potatoes or parsnips. Chop them into bits big enough to fit in the pan - we're not finely chopping veg for soup here, just hacking stuff up to make stock so don't waste time making 1/4" dice or anything. Don't even worry about peeling them or taking off the tops, just heave it all in. Add also a few whole herbs and spices such as bay leaves, a few peppercorns, springs of parsley or rosemary or whatever you've got knocking around. Again, don't chop them, just drop them in. Then leave it all bubbling away for a couple of hours.

Strain it into a bowl and save the liquor. Don't strain it into the sink, that's the whole point of the exercise. Throw out the bones and veggies and all the yukky looking stuff. The beautiful, divine-smelling, clear-coloured stock is what you've gone to all this trouble for. Believe me, Mr Oxo sells nothing like this.

Measure how much stock you have. For every pint of stock put a big dollop of duck fat into a pan (you mean you didn't save your duck fat? You fool! What did you do with it then? No, don't tell me, I can't bear to hear. Well use butter instead and next year save the fat) and then gently fry a pound of chopped mixed vegetables (one pound for every pint of stock, that is). The exact mixture isn't important, but the flavour is nicer if there is a fair bit of variety - if it's all potatoes it's rather dull. I'd want something oniony - onions, shallots, leeks, anything like that, and also perhaps some carrots, celery, swede, potatoes, nothing green like broccoli or cabbage though just because it turns the soup a nasty brown colour. Once you've sweated the veg for a while, pour the stock back on top, put a lid on and leave it to simmer for another hour or two. Then whizz it up with a stick blender (or put it laboriously through a liquidiser in batches, or rub it even more laboriously through a sieve and remember to ask Santa for a stick blender next year). Slosh in a generous slug of Madeira (which you already have in the cupboard as it's an essential ingredient in gravy) or failing that port or wine (red or white) or whatever alcohol you've got short of a Bacardi Breezer, and slosh of cream and stir it all in. Have a taste and see if you feel like adding any salt or pepper, but since it's based on fantastic stock you may well need neither. A spot of chopped parsley as you serve it tells people this soup has nothing to do with Mr Heinz. If you haven't any parsley, don't worry - as soon as they taste it, they'll know.

Vegetarian Christmas Dinner

Wow, the number of people arriving at this site by googling for "vegetarian Christmas dinner" is amazing. Most of them end up on the page where I put the recipe for stuffed roast butternut squash, which would make a great Christmas dinner. But that's not what we're having this year.

Vegetarian Cheesey Roast

Rip up half a loaf of wholemeal bread into a food processor and whizz it to breadcrumbs. Place this in a bowl with half a pound of really tasty cheddar cheese, such as from the Snowdonia Cheese Company, grated (I use the grater attachment on the food processor), cut an onion into quarters and whizz that into pieces in the food processor and put in the bowl with the other ingredients. Add half a cup of thick cream, a handful of chopped mixed fresh herbs, a very generous pinch of mustard powder, a normal-sized pinch of cayenne pepper, and plenty of salt and freshly milled black pepper. Mix it all together and it will come into a doughy lump.

This in fact is more-or-less Delia Smith's recipe for Glamorgan sausages, which she uses as the basis of vegetarian sausage rolls and very nice they are too. they're also nice fried up as vegetarian sausages, and the same mixture can be used in all kinds of other ways to make tasty vegetarian meals. We'll be using it to stuff a suet roll.

For the suet pastry, mix 8oz wholemeal self raising flour, a small handful of chopped fresh herbs, a pinch of salt and 4oz vegetarian suet in a mixing bowl and add a little cold water until it comes together into a pliable dough. Turn it onto a floured board and knead lightly, then rest it for a few minutes before rolling out out into an oblong.

Now put the cheesey mixture over the top of the pastry rectangle in an even-ish layer, then roll it up from the narrow end. Moisten the join with water to make it stick and place the roll on a tray with the join underneath and bake at 200C, 400F, Gas 6 for about 30-35 minutes.

Serve it with roast potatoes (roast them in vegetable oil, not dripping or lard, for vegetarians), mashed parsnips, sprouts, Yorkshire puddings (again make sure your roasting oil is veggie-friendly), bread sauce (don't leave this out - if you follow my recipe it's the best bit of the whole meal, I promise), and vegetarian stuffing. The vegetarian in your family will thank you.

Mincemeat

I made my Christmas mincemeat. The recipe started out as one of Delia's, but nowadays it's more "fling a bunch of dried fruit, spices, nuts, sugar and suet in a bowl until you've got about 6lb. Add a slug of brandy. Add more brandy. Top up the brandy for good measure, then bung it in some jars". We like fresh cranberries in our mincemeat, and chopped pecans, prunes and apricots. And we use vegetarian suet so everybody can eat it.

The mincemeat mostly gets made into mince pies, but it's useful stuff to have around. You can also use it in tarts, to fill filo pastry parcels, I've also been known to stir it into hot porridge and it's excellent in baked apples.



The idea for the labels comes from the excellent Mrs Nesbitt, who seems to have fallen off my links list, so I'll replace her. There. That's better.

Vegetarian Roast Dinner

My dad has invited us to Sunday lunch today. I'm looking forward to it, he does a great roast dinner. He's roasting a leg of lamb for himself and me, but my husband, Ed, is a vegetarian. It's OK, Ed loves all the trimmings and will be very happy indeed with a plate full of roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, mashed parsnips, carrots, stuffing, and plenty of bread sauce and vegetarian gravy.

When I do a roast dinner at home, though, I often make my own vegetarian version of a roast stuffed chicken: stuffed butternut squash. If I'm feeling lazy I might use a packet stuffing mix (one of the nice ones with rosemary and a sachet of apricot jam to mix up with the stuffing), but on special occasions I make my own stuffing.

Stuffed Butternut Squash

Easy version - cut a butternut squash in half, scoop out the seeds and feed to the chickens, mix up the stuffing according to the packet and use to stuff the squash halves. There'll be too much stuffing, so spread it all over the cut surface of one of the squash halves. Reassemble the halves to make a sort of squash/stuffing sandwich. Rub with butter or olive oil, wrap in foil and bake for a bit in a quite hot oven. (sorry I can't do temperatures in degrees and times and stuff, I don't usually cook like that). Serve with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce and all the trimmings.

Complicated version - make stuffing as follows: fry an onion (chopped very fine) in 2 oz butter until transparent. Into this, mix 2 to 4 slices of wholemeal bread (ripped into smidgins), a good dollop of dried rosemary (perhaps a tablespoon), same amount of chopped fresh parsley, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Mix in a beaten egg and a big lump of apricot jam. Then follow the instructions above.

Whilst we're on the topic: Bread sauce

Into a heavy saucepan bung 1/2 onion chopped very fine, 1 or 2 slices wholemeal bread ripped into smidgins, 1 oz butter cut into bits, 3-4 whole cloves, 1/2 pint full fat milk, 1/4 pint double cream. Bring it to a simmer then let it sit on the lowest heat with a lid on for as long as it takes to make dinner. Stir sometimes. Before serving add a dollop more cream, salt and freshly ground black pepper and a generous grating of nutmeg. Yum.

Are you entertaining vegetarians this Christmas? Hit "save"!

Mock Pumpkin Soup

One year I threw an adult Hallowe'en party. It was fairly staid, no dressing up or anything, but we had a roaring fire, plenty of wine, everyone had to tell a scary story, and I promised there would be pumpkin soup and home-made bread. Except when I went out to buy a pumpkin there were none to be had. None at all. Not even for ready money.

So I bought some onions, carrots and swede and I made "mock pumpkin soup". It was orange-coloured, it tasted autumnal, and it was delicious with home-made crusty bread.

A few weeks later I got hold of a pumpkin and made real pumpkin soup for my friends, but they unanimously agreed that the mock pumpkin soup had been better. So here is the recipe for mock pumpkin soup.

Mock Pumpkin Soup

Chop a couple of onions and fry in a knob of butter with a crushed garlic clove. Peel a swede and a few carrots (sorry for the lack of pounds and kilos here, I just don't cook that way - relax, it'll taste great, trust me) and chop into smallish chunks, then fry them also until they start to change colour. Add a pint or so of vegetable stock and about half a pint of milk and simmer with a bayleaf until the veg is tender. Remove the bayleaf and liquidise. Add sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste and generous amounts of freshly grated nutmeg. Serve with a swirl of cream, and home-made crusty bread.

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Step 1 – Making the pumpkin puree
I usually make this pie on Hallowe'en using the scooped-out centre of the pumpkin I carve for the children, or you could buy a pumpkin for the purpose (or a couple of butternut squashes), in which case you'll have to peel it (the skin is quite thin), cut it in half and discard the seeds and the stringy material around them, then cut the flesh into chunks. Either way, boil what you've got with just a little water until the flesh is soft. Line a colander with a clean tea towel and let the cooked flesh stand until all the excess water is drained off. Then puree the pumpkin, either by rubbing through a sieve, with a food processor or hand blender, a ricer, or with a potato masher. I find that one Hallowe'en pumpkin usually yields about 2lbs of puree, so you could make two pies, or freeze some to make another pie later in the year. 2 butternut squashes makes 1lb of puree, just enough for a pie.

Step 2 – Making the pastry case
You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. But this is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 7oz plain flour into a bowl with ½ teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 4oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 2oz caster sugar, 4 egg yolks and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence into the well and then rub in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.
Roll it out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't hardly see the join no more. Stab the bottom with a fork a few times, put a sheet of tin foil inside and fill with blind baking beans, dried chickpeas, or whatever you can find to weigh it down evenly. Then bake at 200°C, 400°F, gas 6 until golden brown and set aside to cool.

Step 3 – Making the filling
Turn down the oven to something lower, because the pastry is now cooked, and all you want to do is gently set the pie filling. Beat 1/2 a pint of cream lightly with 3 eggs, the grated peel of a lemon, and 5oz caster sugar. Stir this mixture into the pumpkin puree and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cloves. Combine thoroughly, then spoon the filling into the pie shell and bake until set and brown.


Serve the pie cold with something creamy. It looks nice with whipped cream piped on top, but it tastes even nicer with a generous dollop of extra thick double cream on the side. Or I like it with something a little bit tart, like crème fraiche or Greek yogurt. Enjoy.

I Feel Like Quiche Tonight

Tonight's dinner, vegetable quiche. Photo by Eleanor Rimmer.

What, you want a recipe for vegetable quiche?

Oh, go on, then.

Vegetable Quiche

Sift 6oz wholemeal flour (chuck in the bits that won't go through the sieve) with a pinch of ground sea salt and rub in 3oz butter until it goes like breadcrumbs, add iced water and mix until it turns into a soft dough, roll out and use to line a quiche tin. Chill the pastry whilst you make the filling. Get a selection of vegetables (I used half a cauliflower, a couple of carrots and a leek), cut them quite small and boil for five minutes. Strain and put them in the quiche case. Beat 3 egg yolks with 4floz double cream and 4floz of full cream milk, season with ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and plenty of freshly grated nutmeg and pour over the vegetables. Top with a handful of grated cheddar cheese and bake in a moderate oven until set (perhaps 20-25 minutes).

Make a couple whilst you're at it. They freeze well, and anyway, it's Ed's favourite.

Soft Cheese

I mentioned that you can make soft cheese out of yogurt. It's ridiculously easy. You can use skimmed milk to make a low-fat version, or gold-top to make an extra-creamy version, and of course it can be organic if you like. If you use goat's milk it will be goat's cheese.

You can also have fun adding herbs, garlic, or any other flavourings you like. Lots of freshly ground black pepper is nice (I really mean lots and lots so you get a distinct hot peppery taste), or shredded smoked salmon. Chives or finely sliced spring onions are also good. I've never tried it with little shrimps, but you can buy cottage cheese with shrimps so I'm sure it would work.

Yogurt Soft Cheese

Line a colander with a clean non-fluffy cloth and pour in a pint of home-made plain yogurt mixed with two teaspoons of ground sea salt. Fold the cloth over the top and put something heavy on top - I use a cast-iron pan full of water. You want to squeeze all the whey out of the yogurt. Leave it overnight on the draining board, then wring the yogurt in the cloth. Clear liquid will come out. When thick white creamy bits start coming through the holes in the cloth you know you have wrung enough. Scrape the thick yogurt cheese off the cloth into a container. Now you can add any flavourings you want, and keep it in the fridge.

Use it just as you would use any soft cheese such as Philadelphia. I like it spread on crackers with a slice of tomato or cucumber.

High culture

The organic veg box gets delivered each Thursday, so on Thursday nights I use up all the week-old veggies that are still in the fridge. Stir fries, soups and casseroles are all good ways of using up assorted veg, but last night we had a veggie curry, with naan bread and popadums, couscous and salad.

I wanted to make a courgette raita as well, but discovered we'd almost run out of yogurt, so today I made some more. Like bean-sprouts, I've been making my own yogurt for years. It's easy and it's cheaper than buying the stuff. It's also satisfying and fun to make things.

You boil a pint or so of milk (skimmed will work just as well as full-fat or anything in between), then cool it to blood temperature, which is a bit hotter than you think. Then you stir in a tablespoon of live yogurt. I use the last bit of the old batch unless it fails or goes mouldy, in which case I buy a small pot at the health food shop. Then you need to keep it warm for a few hours. I have a yogurt maker that is a sort of wide-necked thermos flask, and another type that is more like an electric incubator. I have to say the incubator type is more reliable.

After a few hours (or overnight) you'll have thickened plain yogurt. You'll want to chill it because warm yogurt is kind of yukky. You can add syrup and fruit to make it more like shop-bought fruit yogurt. I like it with sliced banana and maple syrup. Or you can use it for cooking, for salad dressings, smoothies or frozen yogurt and even make a kind of soft cheese. I'll talk about that in a future post.

One of these days I will make yogurt with milk from my own cow or goat. I'm looking forward to that.

Courgette Raita

Grate a couple of courgettes, mix with a teaspoon of ground sea salt then put them in a colander and leave them to drain for an hour or so. Squeeze any remaining liquid out of the courgettes with clean hands, then mix them with about a half pint of home-made plain yogurt. Heat 1 tsp black onion seeds in a dry frying pan and keep them moving until they start to pop, then quickly tip them onto the yogurt/courgette mixture. Add freshly ground black pepper, and a crushed clove of garlic, and more salt if necessary. Stir well and refrigerate until needed. Serve with crudites and mini popadoms as a dip, or as a side dish with an Indian meal. It is excellent for cooling your mouth when eating very spicy dishes.

Vpud - the verdict

We had a huge vegetarian fry-up for dinner last night:

• Fried duck eggs
• Fried mushrooms
• Fried tomatoes
• Fried bread
• Whole-earth baked beans
• Homemade potato scones
• Realeat Vegebangers
• Realeat Vege Bacon
• Vpud vegetarian black pudding

It was delicious, and the Vpud was the star of the show. It's very similar to normal black pudding in taste and texture, which is important because some vegetarian meat-alike foods have the taste but not the texture. The Realeat Vege Bacon is an example, it tastes like bacon but has a rather nasty paste-like texture. It's great in pasta carbonara but not as good in a BLT. The Vpud however was a very convincing replica of meaty (or should I say bloody) black pudding, I reckon you could slip it into a meaty fry-up and the carnivores would never notice.

Potato Scones

Boil 1lb floury potatoes and mash them. Add a generous knob of butter, plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and enough wholewheat flour to make a dry, rollable dough. Split the dough in half and roll out into two half-inch thick circles. Cut each circle into six wedge-shaped slices with a knife and fry in butter for a few minutes each side.

Spuds, square eggs and blackcurrant ice-cream

Put some spuds in at the allotment. I thought it was too late for spuds but the nice couple who gave them to us said they'd be fine. We had a bare bit anyway where I'd planted some broccoli and cabbages that never came up, so now we have a row of spuds.

I can hear the red chicken from where I'm sat at the computer and she sounds like she's laying a square egg.

I made Sid's blackcurrants (see http://tinyurl.com/jcs8z) into blackcurrant double ripple ice cream. The recipe is from the book The River Cottage Year so I won't reprint it here. But it's on the River Cottage Website at http://tinyurl.com/zv8ry so if you want to make it you can look it up yourself. If you can get hold of blackcurrants I recommend you try it, it's absolutely delicious and also one of those recipes that look like you spent ages faffing on with difficult techniques, but actually it's really easy. I whipped up the first batch whilst I was also cooking dinner, as an afterthought, that's how easy it is. Of course, Sid's delicious allotment blackcurrants make all the difference, and I had enough for two batches so I've plenty of it. I think I'll save some from Sam until one of my sisters visits, because I'll bet they'd like it.

Baking Day

Good, eh, and I'm not done yet. There are still more cooked cherries in the pan which will make a few more batches of cherry choc chunk ice cream as soon as I buy more cream.

And there's good news from the chickens. They hadn't been laying well over the weekend, producing one or no eggs a day. I was waiting for them to get back to normal, and today they produced three egss. Someone is overachieving, but I can't tell who since they both produce identical eggs.

Cherry Jam

Add 6 1/2 lbs pitted home-grown morello cherries to the juice of 3 organic lemons and simmer until the cherries are soft. Add 3 1/2 lbs Whitworth's Jam Sugar and boil until it reaches 106C, or until a small amount poured onto a saucer which has been in the freezer wrinkles when pushed with your finger. Pour into clean sterile jam jars and seal. Wipe and label jars and allow to cool.

Cherry Pie

Add 1lb pitted home-grown morello cherries to the juice of an organic lemon and simmer until the cherries are soft. Add fair trade granulated sugar to taste (probably at least 8oz). Then stir 2 teaspoons arrowroot to 1 tablespoon water and stir until dissolved. pour the arrowroot mixture into the cherries and stir for 30 seconds until thick. Pour the cherry pie filling into a prepared pastry case (I'm not putting pastry instructions here. If you don't already have a favourite sweet short pastry recipe, Google for one), and choose one of the following options:

1. Open cherry tart - that's it. Bake your open tart.
2. Lattice cherry tart - cut strips of leftover pastry and lay them on the tart in a lattice pattern. Brush with beaten egg and bake for about 20 minutes or until golden.
3. Cherry pie - roll out a pie top and place on the pie, crimping the edges with a fork. Cut a hole or two in the top to let steam out during baking. Brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar and bake for about 20 minutes or until golden.

Life is a . . .

We have a cherry tree in the front garden, but normally the birds eat the lot as soon as they start to show any colour at all. But for some reason this year they have left them completely alone, and today Sam and I went out and picked a large bowlful, leaving plenty of unripe cherries on the tree for later.

They're the sour type so you can't eat them raw but they're delicious cooked with plenty of sugar. Sam helped me make some of them into cherry choc chip ice cream, and I froze the rest to make pie or jam later.

Cherry Choc Chunk Ice Cream

De-stone and chop 1 cup of ripe home-grown cherries. Put half of them in a pan with 1 tablespoon of fair trade caster sugar and warm gently until the cherries are soft, then whizz in a blender until liquid. Add 350ml organic cream, 3 organic free range egg yolks and 100g fair trade caster sugar and whizz until well blended. The stir in the rest of the cherries by hand, along with 1/2 cup of fair trade dark choc chunks. I put all this in an ice cream machine, or you could put it in a tupperware container in the freezer and whisk it vigorously every hour until it is too solid to whisk.