Slow Cooker Chef: Warming Winter Mushroom Soup Recipe
Everyone always says that good soup needs a really great stock. Sometimes I simmer bones for stock in the slow cooker and years ago Fred Fitzpatrick used to give me beef bones which I roasted and then bubbled gently for hours to get a good dark tasty stock. But recently I’ve gone back to using stock cubes out of laziness. This week I decided to experiment with leftovers. We had two meals from the game casserole and were left with a ladle of gravy (about 6 tablespoons) with a few bits of meat and veg. Danny had picked up a large box of...
read moreMaking homemade sweets
Apart from Christmases as a very small child I had never attempted to make sweets until this Christmas. I only started doing this to draw a slightly different crowd to our gate side stand. The ‘melt in the mouth’ fudge sold very well and didn’t need an expensive new jar and lid. Although I agree with Suky it wasn’t quite chewy enough for me – so I’ll cook it until it’s golden brown next time. I packed it in little cellophane envelopes that are sold for handmade cards. With the standard red raffia bows I tried...
read moreSlow cooker chef: warming winter mixed game casserole recipe
Unless you have a shotgun and access to rough shooting, game can be a very expensive treat in the UK. A small pack of mixed game from Waitrose will set you back around a fiver. So when Danny spotted two bags of mixed game marked down to £1.25 each he grabbed them with a chortle. “Oh dear,” I secretly thought, “This meat needs to be cooked immediately and I haven’t got the right vegetables for a game casserole.” But of course I had dehydrated ones – it’s difficult to switch on to this new source of bounty having just cooked with...
read moreBest melt in the mouth vanilla fudge recipe
Danny loves fudge. A few weeks ago he bought some fudge in Newmarket. It was inedible, chewy, tasteless stuff. Danny has a sweet tooth and a passion for cheap sweets and even he couldn’t get beyond the first mouthful and threw the rest away. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered making fudge as a child – or rather watching my mum making fudge. We used to make sweets as Christmas presents individually wrapped in cellophane like little jewels. I trawled the internet for recipes – there were millions of them but this one by Nick...
read moreThe slow cooker chef: Chicken and red pepper casserole recipe
The best piece of kitchen equipment that I bought in 2008 was my slow cooker. I found mine in a sale at Tesco and had no idea how much more flavoursome slow cooking can be. So why did I buy one? I had been seduced by Angela and the thought of slow cooked steak and kidney. Initially I reckoned that I would just use it in the winter but it’s used all year round now and saves us lots of cash as the electricity used to run it is minimal. And most things do taste better when they are slow cooked. Now I’ve got to grips with how to cook with...
read moreHot Spiced Cranberry and Apple Sauce recipe
When I worked out how much money I was making from the jars of cranberry and clementine sauce on my gate side stand I found that I was barely breaking even. Cranberries are expensive in the UK – as most of them are imported from America. I love the intensity of my quick cranberry sauce but surely I could come up with something a little bit different that would pad out the cranberries and make a delicious ‘have with anything’ thick fruity sauce. I don’t know which inspirational angels were floating in the kitchen but this sauce is a...
read moreHot apple and chilli jelly recipe
Danny doesn’t like things to be too hot but strangely the combination of sweet and heat in this jelly gets the thumbs up from him. Apple chilli jelly is brilliant with sausages, pork, lamb or any rich meat. Pork chops baked with a few tablespoons of this jelly are yummy. In fact it’s a very versatile preserve and well worth making. I’ve even added a little to winter salad dressings to give them a bit of a lift. The health benefits of eating chillies are amazing. I thought that I’d written up this recipe and spent ages looking for it...
read moreMushrooms braised in butter and red wine recipe
At the moment we are flat out making jars of chutney and Christmas relishes for our garden gate stand which hopefully will be up and running this weekend. So supper has to be quick and easy. The slow cooker is busy bubbling away with meals which are frozen in portions so we can eat well with the minimum palaver. I’ve discovered that freezing in portions of about 2 centimetres deep means that these meals can be heated from frozen very gently in a sauté pan with a lid. We quite often eat steak and kidney pie filling without the pastry...
read more
FD