Marzipan Cake

This is a rich almondy cake made with marzipan.

It is moist enough to not need any further icing or filling, and makes a good alternative to a traditional Christmas Cake if you are not into dried fruit.

I originally came across the recipe years ago on Amateur Gourmet.

Easy Cheesy Sunflower Crackers

Its time for the annual Xmas baking rush. These simple cheesy crackers made from sunflower seeds and grated cheese can be pimped up with all sorts of different herb and spice flavours and seed toppings to make a good selection for holiday snacking.

The original recipe comes from "500 Low-Carb Recipes" by Dana Carpender.

Red Cabbage Kimchi

We appear to have built up a surfeit of red cabbage, having received large red cabbages in two vegbox deliveries in a row, so I am trying making a batch of Kimchi.

Kimchi is like the Korean equivalent of Sauerkraut - generally made from chinese cabbage rather than european, and seasoned with ginger, garlic and lots of hot chillies, rather than caraway seeds. Both are fermented until sour rather than pickled with vinegar.

This recipe comes from Garden Betty.

I have halved the quantities, and didn't have spring onions to hand, so substituted thinly sliced red onion.

• 1 lb Red Cabbage, sliced into bitesize pieces
• 1/8 cup of Salt
• 4oz of Daikon (aka Mooli) (a big white radish), peeled and shredded
• 4oz Carrot, peeled and shredded
• 1 small Red Onion, peeled and thinly sliced
• 2-4 cloves Garlic, peeled and minced
• About 1/2"-1" long chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and minced.
• Dried red chillies, powdered in a spice mill: 1/4 cup powder.
• 1 small apple, peeled and cored
• 1 small yellow onion, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 cup water, boiled and cooled
• 1 tbsp thai fish sauce

Combine the cabbage and salt in a large bowl and mix together with your hands, separating the layers of cabbage leaf and ensuring they all get coated with salt. Pour in some water to cover, and leave it to brine for a couple of hours until the cabbage feels floppy. Drain, rinse in fresh water and drain again. Return the drained cabbage to the big bowl.

Add the daikon, carrot, red onion, garlic and ginger to the cabbage in the large bowl.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a blender and blend to a paste.

Pour the paste onto the cabbage and other vegetables. Wearing plastic gloves (or just with plastic freezer bags over your hands), mix the paste thoroughly through the vegetables until all the pieces are coated in it.

Pack the kimchi into kilner jars, leaving space at the top for the liquid level to rise during fermentation. Cover loosely with lids and let sit at room temperature for at least 3 days until it becomes sour. As the liquid rises in the jars, press down the vegetables with a spoon to submerge them.

Once the kimchi has soured to taste, tighten the lids and store the jars in a cool place.

Eat as a pickle, or add to stir-fries and casseroles.

Ninniko Shoyuzuke

Don't you hate it when it turns out that somewhere on its journey from farm to shop, someone refrigerated the garlic?

The garlic thinks: "Hm. It was really cold for a while, but now its getting warmer. Must be springtime! Sprout factor 9, Mr Sulu!"

...And your lovely big bargain bag of garlic bulbs starts sprouting everywhere and needs to all be used up at once ASAP!

Fortunately, this Japanese style no-cook garlic pickle is very quick and easy to prepare - though it does take a couple of months to mature.  There is even a bonus extra side product halfway through!

Your sprouty garlic disaster will be saved, and provide a bounty of garlicky deliciousness.

Coconut, Almond and Courgette Cake

This is another cake based on one from Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache. I believe I may have already mentioned that whilst the recipes are good, I have a distinct antipathy towards the style of the book.

This is a minor variation on the Coconut Cake recipe, mainly inspired by not having quite enough dessicated coconut left in the cupboard.

Lucuma Ice Cream

So I bought a packet of Lucuma powder from the health food shop to see what it was and what it tasted like.

Turns out it is dried powdered fruit. Native to the Andes, it has a sort of caramel/vanilla type of flavour.

It also turns out that Lucuma Ice Cream is one of the most popular flavours of ice cream in Peru. I have no idea what the real thing made from fresh fruit is like, but this recipe for a custard-based icecream flavoured with the powder is pretty good!

Cherry Plum Ice Cream

This was thrown together in full-on experimental mode, in an effort to prove that cherry plums are good for more than just jam-making - so no measurements noted, I'm afraid.

* I stewed some cherry plums in the pressure cooker with a piece of cinnamon stick, and then rubbed them through a colander to puree them and remove the stones.

* I sweetened the plum puree until it tasted sweet enough warm.

* I chilled the plum puree thoroughly.

* In a jug I combined 3/4 pint of cold cherry plum puree, a slug of sloe gin, and 1/2 pint of whipping cream, and stirred to combine.

* On tasting, I decided the mixture was not quite sweet enough, so I then added a slug of runny honey and stirred to combine again.

* The resulting salmon-pink mixture went into the icecream maker to churn in the usual way.

Result - a litre tub of Cherry Plum Ice Cream now firming up in the freezer.


The extra leftover plum puree will end up mixed into cold custard to make a Cherry Plum Fool.

Sort of Persian-inspired Fish and Rice

A random experiment to use up some broad beans, inspired by reading through some Persian recipes.
The result was tasty, and worth recording so we can repeat it another day.
Add more chopped fresh herbs if you have them - parsley, dill, chives, fenugreek leaves...

• 1 Onion, chopped
• a knob or two of Butter
• 1 bunch Coriander Leaves, finely chopped
• a few sprigs of garden Mint Leaves, finely chopped
• 1 cup Basmati Rice
• 1 mini carton of White Wine, plus water to make it up to 1.5 cups total liquid
• Salt, Pepper, Cinnamon and a little Turmeric to season
• 3 frozen fillets of White Fish
• Fresh Broad Beans, shelled.

Turn on the rice cooker to cook mode and melt the butter in its pan.
Saute the onions in the butter until translucent.
Add the rice, wine+water, chopped herbs and seasonings and stir to combine.
Layer the frozen fillets and the broad beans on top of the rice.
Put the lid on the rice cooker, switch it off and on again, and restart the cook cycle.
Once the rice cooker switches to keep warm, let it stand for a few more minutes to finish steaming the fish and beans.
Break up the fish into bitesize pieces and fold gently through the rice.

Mango Kulfi

The weather is threatening to maybe get hotter in the next few days, and the huge tins of mango pulp were on special offer at the supermarket.

Time to make this quick Indian kulfi-style mango icecream, in the hope some survives long enough to eat in the sunshine...

If you don't have an icecream maker, just pour the mixture into ice lolly moulds and freeze as individual portions.

Marmalade (again)

The problem with my first recipe for making marmalade is that peeling and preparing the raw fruit throws up a lot of the volatile oils in the orange peel that I cannot stomach, leading to needing to round up a helper to do that bit for me.

This time I tried another method in which the fruit is poached whole so that the peel is already soft and cooked when it is chopped up, and doesn't therefore spray orange oils around the place.

Crumpets

If I'd realised they were so easy to make, I'd've made crumpets years ago!

Crumpets are yeast-leavened pancakes that are cooked on a girdle, supported by a metal ring. The name is believed to possibly be a borrowing into English of the Welsh word crempog, meaning a pancake.

Freshly-baked crumpets make you realise how stale and old the ones you buy in the shops really are. So next time you fancy some crumpets for tea, get cooking.

Basboosa

I found a bottle of rose flavoured syrup for a few pence in the reduced to clear section in Tesco just before Xmas. It was perfect for this Lebanese cake, made with semolina and yoghurt, and soaked in a flavoured syrup.

It was quick and easy to make - but also quick and easy to eat! I didn't manage to get pictures before it was scoffed! The picture is of a later batch made another day.

Buckwheat Kasha

Buckwheat is one of those things you find lurking with the other unusual whole grains in places like health food shops. It is not actually a true grain at all, but the seeds of a plant related to rhubarb.

Once or twice as a student, I had attempted to cook buckwheat by boiling it like rice, but it tended to just turn into an unappetising mush.

When I bought a rice cooker, I went looking for books on how to cook different grains in it. I discovered The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook. And therein, I discovered the secret of how to cook buckwheat without turning it to mush: just add an egg or two.