Hot spiced plum chutney recipe
I had a yearning for a new plum chutney. Something fruity, spicy and hot. A chutney that could accompany roast pork, lamb or duck and be good with cheese sandwiches. A chutney that would inspire me to find infinite ways to use it. We have a plum tree in our garden. It has large dark skinned plums. This year the harvest is enormous and during the recent high winds plums rained down on the driveway. Damaged windfall plums are perfect for making jam or chutney. I made a batch of our plum and tamarind chutney and then came up with this...
read moreGreengage jam recipe
Photograph courtesy of ilco “Do you think that my greengage jam has set enough?” The chicken lady passed me a teaspoon filled with greengage loveliness. It was excellent, not too runny. And the taste was superb. “I used less sugar than the recipe as we don’t like jam to be too sweet.” “I heard once that if you include some kernels it helps it to set.” “Funny that you should say that. My grandmother always included almonds in her greengage jam.” “Perhaps they were kernels?” TCL had given me a haul of greengages and...
read moreRoast chicken thighs with summer vegetables recipe
Why chicken thighs again? For one thing, it makes a succulent, tasty and economical meal. Also, Fiona split her jam making over two days, which is a great idea because it is then less of a major task. The house is filled with the aroma from the two jam saucepans. One has wild plum and the other is greengage. I am the unofficial taster and quality assurance agent, apparently. So I am giving her a night off from writing. We had this variation on Shereen’s excellent original already this week. I found a large gammon at the CFC on Thursday and...
read moreRoast and smoked duck risotto recipe
Whenever we find a free range duck on offer we squeeze it into the freezer for a really special meal. Last weekend Danny roasted a duck and served it with a blueberry and plum sauce. Superb. Incidentally we usually cook fruit with the duck to make a sort of instant sauce. This time he roasted the duck “plain” and made the sauce separately. The duckiness of the duck was so good that I think that we’ll cook duck this way from now on. “We can make a duck risotto with the leftovers. Possibly two.” Danny chortled as he cut himself...
read moreBeetroot crisps recipe: a way to cope with and enjoy a beetroot glut
Vegetable crisps are surprisingly delicious. I was first introduced to them at a party in the 90’s, when a bowl of these were passed round and scoffed. They must have been Tyrrell’s as this was the first company to manufacture them in the UK. Last year I dehydrated beetroot slices for the winter and discovered that I had made tasty, healthy crisps. They didn’t last very long once we’d tasted them – we guzzled the winter stores within a week. This year I’m going to increase our vegetable crisp repertoire and try...
read moreDelicious pork steaks recipe: baked with wild plum jelly and blackcurrants
However careful I am about constructing my fruit cages a hungry bird or twenty always seems to crack the code and get in. One year one of our fruit cages was constructed with high security in mind – nothing apart from me could get in or out and it was such a struggle to access that I cursed the plan all Summer. It seemed to work initially and then deteriorated fast. A family of wrens had built a teeny nest in the climbing roses at the back of the cage. I didn’t notice them during the construction process and only realised that they...
read moreAlphonso’s Chicken Bonne Femme recipe – cooked in a Thermos
Well how did the cockerels taste? Massimo is in the freezer as I chose Alphonso to star in our first eat your own chickens post. I decided a slow cook method was probably best so I christened The Giant Thermos that I bought from the church fete this year. I also tried to use as many ingredients from our kitchen garden. We had fresh garlic – for the first time a decent sized bulb. Carrots – many strange and evocative shapes here as we don’t really have the perfect soil for them. Potatoes, just a tiny bit of slug/xxx damage – just...
read moreBelly of Pork with Morello cherries recipe
Over the past few years I’ve bought a number of fruit bushes and trees from the budget supermarket Netto. This can be a bit of a hit and miss affair. The green gooseberry bush turned out to be a succulent red dessert variety and tiny hands clapped with glee. About three years ago I bought a couple of cherry trees – one Morello and one dessert cherry. The later has been grown in a frame in one of the fruit cages. Last year they fruited and we discovered that both specimens were Morello trees. After the initial disappointment – cherries...
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