Pumpkin pie with cardamom pastry

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img_1215I know, pumpkins are neither foraged nor wild. This one, in fact, was £1 from Asda and I rummaged in a big bin for it, alongside several small children (the competition was good for them).

This post is in response to a sad statistic that I heard today – that in the UK 18,000 tons of edible pumpkin is thrown away each year. That’s the weight of 1,500 double-decker buses, according to The Independent.

That’s wrong, on so many levels. For one thing, when people are hungry, we should never be throwing food in the bin. For another, much of this waste will end up in landfill, emitting gases we could do without. And most personally, it means lots of children aren’t growing up with the memories I have, not only of carving the pumpkin but eating it too. And making strange jewellery out of the seeds.

Mum would usually make pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie, both of which I loved. The pie wasn’t sickly sweet, just on the sweet side of savoury, and full of nutmeg and other spices. I’m using my mum’s recipe here for the filling, which she says she pretty much made up (but didn’t write down, so I’m guessing a bit with quantities). Many of the other recipes out there use molasses or a lot more sugar, and less spice. They can jog on; here’s how it should be done.

The cardamom pastry was just me getting fancy, after being reminded recently about what a lovely but underused spice cardamom is. It works, if you like that kind of thing, which I do.

Pastry ingredients
225g plain flour
110g cold butter,  cubed
30g icing sugar
1 egg
zest of 1 orange
seeds of 10 cardamom pods, ground

Filling ingredients
Flesh of 1 medium pumpkin
100g caster sugar
3 eggs
150ml single cream
half a nutmeg, grated
1tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp ground ginger

Instructions

  1. Put the flour and butter in a large bowl and rub with your fingers until it resembles breadcrumbs.
  2. Add the egg, icing sugar, zest and cardamom and ‘bring together’ with a knife. When I say bring together, we both know I mean get rid of the knife and crush it together with a fork, while swearing. You might need to add a tiny bit of cold water.
  3. Put the pastry in the fridge for half an hour.
  4. Put the pumpkin flesh in a saucepan with a little bit of water, and put the lid on. Simmer for 10 or 15 mins, stirring occasionally, until the pumpkin is soft.
  5. Drain off the water, then blend the pumpkin until smooth. Stir in the sugar, and leave to cool.
  6. Pre-heat the oven to 160C and grease a 20cm pie tin.
  7. Roll out the pastry, and lay it gently in the pie tin. Obviously it will disintegrate into a thousand pieces, so patch it up as best you can. Don’t leave any holes for the filling to seep out of.
  8. Bake blind for 20 minutes. If you’re grown up, you’ll know that means to line it and use your neat little stash of baking beans. If you’re not, just cover it with some greaseproof paper and put something heavy on top – empty glass jars, a casserole dish, something like that. You’re looking to bake the pastry without letting it rise, so you just need something to hold it down.
  9. Bake open for a further 15 minutes (ie remove all the weighty-down stuff).
  10. Meanwhile, your pumpkin has cooled down a bit, so now you can add the cream and eggs and stir well. Add the spices too. I put in more than I owned up to above, if I’m honest.
  11. Pour the filling into the pastry case.
  12. Bake for 45 mins, or until the filling has set to a gentle wobble.

All done. Leave it to cool on a rack for 5 mins, then serve warm with fresh cream.

Fancy getting seedy?

img_1212Back in the day we used to do Arty Things with them, but that’s not quite the same when you’re 36 and home alone.

The nutritious bit is the green seed inside the white husk, but trust me, they taste like a health food shop smells. They’re much more fun if you spice up the husk with tasty things and eat that too.

Rinse the seeds and dry them, then spread out on a baking tray and add olive oil, fennel seeds, chili seeds and honey, and rub it all together. Put in the oven for 10-15 mins, jiggling around occasionally, until golden.

That’s it, they’re ready to eat.

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Gluten-free chestnut and pear cake

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img_1168It was Geoff’s book launch yesterday, and I wanted to make something (with mainly wild ingredients) for people to nibble on. We had a glut of pears and sweet chestnuts, so I started looking in the usual places, but chestnuts don’t seem to be widely used in baking, at least in this country. Or when they are, they’re paired with chocolate, which I thought might overwhelm their subtle taste.

I’d heard you could use them to make a (gluten-free) flour, as per the Italian ‘poor man’s cake’ Castagnaccio, which looks delicious – but it contains pine nuts and I wanted a recipe where all the ingredients could, in theory, be foraged in the UK. Eventually I found this recipe from Azalea’s Kitchen, which I’ve adapted by removing the chocolate and adding pears, and substituting fresh chestnuts for the chestnut puree.

This recipe was a great success, yielding a moist, light, subtly flavoured cake that wasn’t too sweet. Everyone liked it. BUT, I’m going to say this right up front, making chestnut flour is labour intensive! It took probably two hours to remove the shells from enough chestnuts (pro tip: wait for them to cool, they come out easier). So if anyone knows how to speed up that process, I’d be glad to hear it.

img_1166Once they’re shelled, you just crumble them or put them through a food processor. I also spread them out thinly to dry for an hour, as I thought that might help give a lighter texture, but I don’t know how necessary this is.

In future I’d be interested to try this recipe with honey instead of sugar, but I know that can create challenges with texture too, so on this occasion I played it safe!

Time

4 hours to prepare the flour
20 mins to prepare the cake
50 mins to cook

Ingredients

  • 4 eggs
  • 200g sugar
  • 100g butter / coconut oil / other oil
  • 200g ground almonds / other nuts
  • 400g shelled chestnuts (about 500g before shelling)
  • zest of one lemon / orange
  • 1tsp baking powder
  • 3 ripe pears

Instructions

  1. Score the chestnuts and roast for 30 mins. Set aside to cool.
  2. Peel the chestnuts (ha, she says), then crumble them to a flour-like texture, or use a food processor. Spread the flour out to dry for an hour.
  3. Pre-heat the oven to 180 (160 fan) and line a 20cm tin.
  4. Slice the pears and set aside.
  5. Separate the eggs. Whisk the yolks and sugar together until creamy.
  6. Add the melted butter, or whatever fat you’re using.
  7. Add the ground almonds, chestnut flour, lemon zest and baking powder and mix well.
  8. Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks, then fold gently into the cake mixture. Don’t over-mix.
  9. Pour the mixture into the tin and arrange the pear slices across the top.
  10. Bake for 50 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean.

Leave to cool, and voila!

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Elderflower champagne – hic!

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20140617_213935This was my first attempt at making wine. We don’t have any special equipment at the moment, so I cleaned up a household bucket, asked Geoff to switch his beer-drinking habits to Grolsch for a couple of weeks (for the swing-top bottles), and bought some balloons (bear with me…).

I basically used this recipe from Channel 4, which is in turn taken from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s River Cottage Spring series. However, the reader comments on the Channel 4 page worried me so much that they almost put me off trying – it seemed nearly everyone who had tried the recipe had suffered explosions.

Ours has been going for nearly two weeks now, with no explosions so far, so below I’ll also explain how I did it safely. (Now if that’s not asking for an explosion I don’t know what is!)

elderflowerIngredients
4 litres of hot water
2 litres of cold water
juice and zest of four lemons
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
15 elderflower heads – picked before noon on a sunny day
1tsp champagne yeast (may not be needed)

Plus: 18x330ml Grolsch bottles or 12x450ml Grolsch bottles or equivalent plastic carbonated drink bottles. These must be sterilised – I used sterilising tablets made for babies’ bottles, 80p from Asda.

Instructions
1. Put the hot water and sugar in a clean bucket and stir until the sugar dissolves, then add the cold water.
2. Add the lemon juice, zest, vinegar and elderflower heads.
3. Weight down the elderflowers with a plate, so they don’t stick up out of the water and go mouldy.
4. Cover with a tea towel and leave in a cool place for two or three days.
5. Check the mixture, and if it’s not at all foamy on top, there may not be enough natural yeast in there – so add a teaspoon of champagne yeast and stir it in.
5. Leave for four or five more days, stirring each day.
6. Strain through a sieve draped in muslin and pour into bottles, leaving a 1-inch gap at the top.
20140614_0005077. Don’t seal the bottles – instead put a balloon over the neck of each one.
8. Put the bottles in a cool place, with a little space between them (in case the balloons blow up big and knock the surrounding bottles over) and revisit them every day. If the balloons are full, let out the gas. If they’ve blown off, put them back on.
9. When the mixture has calmed down (mine took about five days) and there seems to be little more gas coming out, add a pinch of sugar to each bottle and close the lid. This will re-start the fermentation process and give you bubbles, but in a more controlled manner!
10. There may still be a risk of the bottles exploding when you open them. To keep an eye on this, I dedicated one ‘test bottle’ to reopen a few days later. If it had erupted, I’d have gone around and let the gas out of the others – but it didn’t, just made a satisfying pop and fizz. Of course, then we had to drink it.

Verdict
I’d love to say that it’s delicious, but to be honest “drinkable” is probably a more accurate word. Having said that, apparently it improves if you leave it a few weeks. It’s a lovely colour, it smells gorgeous and it’s nice and sparkly.

Alcohol content
I estimate that the alcohol content is about 5% abv (if you wanted a higher alcohol content, you could put in more sugar at the beginning).

Cost: £2.40 for six litres – or 40p for the equivalent of a 75cl bottle of wine
Lemons – £1
Champagne yeast if needed – 50p
Sugar – 70p
White wine vinegar – 20p

Jew’s ear and wild garlic pasta

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P1070649 It’s that time of year when, walking through the woods – or even the local park, in this case, you’re periodically greeted by pungent breezes from crops of wild garlic. The Jew’s ear, or jelly ear, fungus is still out on the elder trees, so I thought it was time to combine the two flavours.

You’re not allowed to dig up the roots of the wild garlic, but that’s OK because the leaves are perfectly garlicky enough anyway.

P1070641This is a really quick, simple and cheap dish. Be prepared that no-one will want to kiss you for a couple of days afterwards, however.

Ingredients (serves two)
1-2 handfuls of wild garlic leaves
10-15 Jew’s/jelly ear fungi
200g spaghetti
olive oil, salt and pepper, knob of butter
handful of toasted pine nuts (optional – I added these for a bit of protein)

P1070639Instructions
Put the spaghetti on to boil. Rinse, dry and slice the fungi. Rinse and roughly chop the garlic. Heat the olive oil, then add the fungi. Don’t let it get too hot, as the fungi can start ‘popping’ at high temperatures. Fry for about five minutes. Drain the spaghetti and add the knob of butter and stir. Then add the cooked fungi and raw garlic leaves, plus salt and pepper. If you’re adding pine nuts, toast them briefly in a hot frying pan until they’re slightly browned, then sprinkle on top.

Cost: 20p
Spaghetti: 20p
Pine nuts (optional): 80p

Slow food: garden snails

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Now I’m not going to lie to you. When Geoff appeared in the lounge brandishing a handful of what looked suspiciously like garden snails, my heart didn’t jump for joy.

snails

They were indeed garden snails (Helix aspersa), which he’d found hibernating in part of a dry stone wall. If you want to eat snails at any other time of year, when they’re not hibernating, you have to keep them for a week and purge them. However, they purge themselves before they hibernate, so if you find them all tucked up for winter, you can eat them straight away.

So he went ahead and cooked them, with plenty of garlic, and I must admit they were OK. Not up there in my top ten, but they’re a good source of protein and iron, and heck, if the French can do it so can we.

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Here’s the recipe, in Geoff’s own delicate words:

“First I dropped them in boiling water (to kill them).  After about a minute or two I drained the water, then removed them from their shells and washed them in cold water, removing any remaining gloop and dangly bits.  I then fried a bit of garlic in olive oil, then when the garlic had started to cook I added the snails and a bit of parsley.  Might have been better in butter.”

Beef and horn of plenty pie

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P1070384Yesterday we found a huge patch of horn of plenty, so I thought I’d try out a recipe I’ve been mulling over for a while. It’s loosely based on Jamie Oliver’s excellent steak and cheese pie, but with less meat, more mushrooms and no cheese (well, I did say loosely!). I’ve called it a pie, but it’s more like a casserole with a pastry lid, to be honest.

It came out really well and makes a great winter warmer. The horn of plenty has quite a delicate, aromatic taste, and complements the beer nicely. I think it’s worth layering the meat and mushrooms, rather than mixing them, so you get both tastes. The following serves 3-4.

P1070387

Ingredients
2 onions
2 cloves of garlic
1 carrot
1 stick of celery
400g horn of plenty
300g diced beef
fresh rosemary
half a can of Guinness
1 tbsp flour
100g ready-made puff pastry
salt and pepper

P1070388Instructions
Chop and fry the onion, garlic, carrot and celery. When they’re starting to brown, add the beef, rosemary, salt and pepper. Transfer to a casserole dish, pour over the Guinness and stir in the flour. Put in the oven at 190C. After 1.5 hours, stir and return to the oven for another hour or until the mixture thickens. Remove the lid (the casserole dish is about to become a pie dish).

Fry the mushrooms, then spread them in a thick layer across the meat mixture. Roll out the pastry, and tuck it over the mushrooms and meat. Brush the top with egg or milk, and return to the oven for 30-45 minutes.

Cost: £5.53
Beef: £2.34
Guinness: £1.89
Pastry: £1.10
Carrot: 10p
Celery: 10p
Onions: 20p

Wild mushroom and sweet chestnut pâté

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sweet chestnutsI nearly left it too late for experimenting with sweet chestnuts – the squirrels have had most of them. But while there are still a few around, I decided to have a go at making a vegetarian pâté. I also used some lovely horse mushrooms that we found growing on a verge, and some winter chanterelles, which are still out in full force. The winter chanterelles can be quite hard to spot, until you get your eye in, because they blend in with the fallen leaves – see the photo below.

I couldn’t find any existing recipes that used both mushrooms and sweet chestnuts (though while searching I did find an awful lot made with chestnut mushrooms!), so I adapted a mushroom pâté recipe from BBC Food.

It makes a subtly flavoured but tasty pâté, and is lovely on wholemeal toast. The chestnuts give it a bit of sweetness and crunch. I’m giving myself a pat on the back for this one.

winter chanterellesIngredients
To make about four servings:
50g butter
300g mushrooms (I used 200g horse mushrooms and 100g winter chanterelles)
75g sweet chestnuts
1 small onion
1 clove garlic
juice of half a lemon
100g ricotta
1 tsp nutmeg

Instructions
Use a knife to score an ‘x’ into each sweet chestnut, then roast them in the oven at 200C for 30 mins. Fry up the onion, garlic and mushrooms until soft. Add the lemon juice, then strain the mixture in the colander. (Keep the juices for using in something else, such as gravy.) Shell the chestnuts and add to the mushrooms. Roughly blend the mixture, then mix in the ricotta and nutmeg, plus salt and pepper if you like. Chill before serving.

mushroom and sweet chestnut pate

Cost = 95p
50g butter – 20p
1 small onion – 10p
half a lemon – 15p
100g ricotta – 50p
That’s 95p if you already had the ingredients, or £3 if you had to go out and shop from scratch.

Damson and apple jam

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damsons and apples

If you’re going to have a go at jam-making, first can I recommend you get this song in your head. Where it will stay all day. No need to thank me.

On our way back from a walk, we passed a wild damson* tree laden down with fruit, so we stopped and picked some. The cooking apples are from a tree that hangs over into our garden.

I followed this recipe from Gransnet.


Ingredients
1kg damsons
500g apples
1/4 litre water
granulated sugar (weight to be determined later)

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Instructions
Wash and destalk the damsons, chop the apples (no need to peel), and boil both gently until soft. Push through a colander to remove the seeds and skins. (I say ‘push through’ like it’s a serene thing, but it’s more like a jammy wrestling match.) Weigh the puree, and add the same weight of sugar. Mix it well, then boil for 15 minutes.

20131103_185212

Two important jam-makin’ things to know before you start:
1) You need a cold plate, so put one in the freezer in preparation. To test if the jam is ready, you drip a bit onto the cold plate, leave it for a couple of seconds, then push it with your finger. If it wrinkles, it’s reached setting point. If it behaves like a liquid, it needs a bit longer.
2) You need warm, sterilised jars at the ready. Wash them in hot water, then put them in the oven at 140C for half an hour before the jam is ready.

Cost: 33p a jar
The only cost was 1.5kg sugar, at £1.30ish from Asda. For that, we filled four big 750g jars (courtesy of a lodger with a love for Dolmio pasta sauces).

*I’m saying ‘damson’ for simplicity. Here’s the Geoff version: “I think what we found might actually have been bullaces, but the whole group – blackthorn (sloes), bullaces, damsons, plums and cherry plums and wild cherries (cherries are just small plums) are all inter-fertile and it is not even clear what the true wild ancestors were, apart from that blackthorn was one of them.  So there are trees growing all over the UK, some of which were planted, others self-seeded which are basically sloe-bullace-damson-cherry-plums – they are a bit like mongrel dogs.  It’s where our concept of what is a “species” starts to break down.  They are all edible, and the taste ranges from sweet to sour to tasteless!”

Wild mushroom and leek tart

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prep2This was a success, and I’d definitely make it again. I used a mixture of hedgehog mushrooms (pied de mouton), winter chanterelles and some rare wavy capped chanterelles.

The hedgehog mushrooms get their name from the thousands of tiny spines on their undersides. The spines are edible but slightly bitter, and they detach themselves during cooking and make your food look weird and speckly. So this time I scraped them off using a teaspoon.

The recipe takes a couple of hours if you make the pastry from scratch. But if you used a ready-made base, you could have it on the table in half an hour.

prep1

Ingredients

For the pastry:
240g plain flour
50g grana padano or other hard cheese
160g butter – chilled and cubed
2 egg yolks
fresh thyme

For the filling:
350g leeks
400g mushrooms (I used 250g hedgehogs, 100g winter chanterelles, 50g wavy-capped chanterelles)
2 cloves garlic
4 eggs
100ml double cream
50g grana padano or other cheese
olive oil
parsley

tart4

Instructions

For the pastry:
Mix the flour, thyme and cheese together, then rub in the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolks and bring together. Chill for 30 minutes then roll out and place in 30cm tin. Chill for another 20 minutes. Bake blind for 20 minutes at 180C then bake open for a further 20 minutes.

For the filling:
Fry the leeks in olive oil, then set aside. Fry the mushrooms in olive oil (I put the hedgehogs in first because they have a sturdier texture, then added the others) then add the butter and garlic. Combine the leeks, mushrooms, cream, cheese, parsley and eggs. Mix well and add seasoning. Pour into the pastry base and bake for 20 minutes at 180C.

Penny bun soup

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Today we found four lovely penny buns (or porcini, or ceps), and decided to be decadent and try out a pure fresh penny bun soup. The results were delicious, but a bit too rich and thick.

In future, I’d probably go for a maximum of half penny buns and half some other, milder mushroom. And more water/stock/wine than I used below. I might also replace the double cream with single cream or milk.

penny bun soup

Ingredients

500g chopped penny buns 
5 shallots
1 clove garlic
500ml chicken stock 
50ml white wine
100ml double cream
butter for frying
salt, pepper, dried thyme

Instructions

Chop the garlic and shallots and fry in butter for four minutes. Chop the penny buns and add them to the pot, frying for a further six or seven minutes. Add the stock, wine, salt, pepper and thyme, and simmer for 15 minutes. Add cream, blend, reheat to hot and then serve.