Blackberry pancakes

This evening F and I used up the blackberries I found earlier in blackberry pancakes, adapted from a recipe by Nigella Lawson in "How to Be a Domestic Goddess".  I had intended to make a whole stack and drizzle them with pine honey, but we were full after one each.  

The batter is in the fridge, maybe for breakfast.  Outside the sky is still blue, and the trees the very dark green they hold in the twilight.  It is warm and still, a beautiful evening.

Blackberry pancakes

This recipe serves at least six as a pudding

For the pancakes

300ml milk

225g self raising flour

2 organic free range eggs

a tablespoon of sugar (or honey if you prefer)

30g butter, melted

For the filling

two handfuls of wild blackberries, washed

a couple of tablespoons of cassis or port

a teaspoon of honey

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix (with an electric blender, ideally).  Leave in the fridge for 20 mins or so to settle. 

Meanwhile, chop the blackberries in half.  I mixed them with the remaining syrup from the Pears au Vin last night, but a little cassis or port with honey would do the trick.  Set aside until ready.

Heat the pan with a nob of butter and spoon in the pancakes (Nigella says pour, I found the batter to be too thick for that).  When the first side is cooked (when it starts to bubble through to the top) spoon over a tablespoon of the blackberry mixture into the centre and deftly flip over.  I find it difficult to do this, but you get the hang of it after a few experimental disasters.

Serve with creme fraiche and maple syrup or pine honey. Yum.

More blackberries, more puddings

M & I were walking the new puppy down to the pond this afternoon and came across a secret bramble bush covered in exactly the kind of blackberries C and I had entirely failed to find on our windswept search a few days ago.

I've decided to try and make blackberry pancakes.  At the moment they are sitting in the fridge while the beautiful autumn sunlight fills the garden outside.  I should be gardening not typing on my computer while I still have all day to enjoy being outside ...

Blackberries, gathered in my jumper.  

This picture does not, fortunately, show the earwig that had just run out from the middle of them.

Poires au Vin Rouge - an autumnal pudding

Pears are in season, so we had them poached in red wine and port with the small bowl of gathered blackberries and fresh vanilla for supper last night.

The recipe originally came from “The French Kitchen A Cookbook” by Joanne Harris (of Chocolate fame) and Fran Wardle.  It is full of the most beautiful photographs, tailored to appeal to die-hard Francophiles such as myself.  This is my (very much amended) version of the one in this book, using the blackberries we picked yesterday.  The French Kitchen recipe uses cloves and mace, but I only had vanilla, which worked well but gave quite a different flavour.   With the blackberries and the port it had a lovely rich flavour, ‘just like autumn’ observed C.

Poires au Vin Rouge

four ripe but not soft pears

¾ of a bottle of rich red wine

100g soft granulated sugar (and more to taste, if required)

1 large glass of Port

half a vanilla pod

crème fraiche to serve

Pour the wine, Port, sugar and split vanilla pod into a pan and place on a low heat.  Meanwhile, carefully peel the pears, taking care to keep their shape and the stalks in place.   Place in the pan with the blackberries and continue to simmer for 30 mins or until the pears are softened but not losing their shape.  

Place the pears and blackberries in a bowl and return the liquid to a high heat.  Take the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds and place them in the liquid.  

Bring to a boil and reduce until starting to form a syrup then pour over the pears.

Serve warm or cool with crème fraiche, clotted cream or vanilla ice cream.

Nadine Abensur's rose water baklava

Cooking with orange flower water the other day made me think of trying to cook something with rose water.  Rosewater is the hydrosol portion of the distillate of rose petals (and a by-product of the production of rose oil) and gives a powerful aromatic flavour to (usually) sweet dishes.

Nadine Abensur has a recipe for rose water baklava, which I might try over the Bank Holiday weekend, and take back to fend off the autumn rain with cup of strong coffee.

Rosewater Baklava

For the baklava

14 sheets of shop bought filo pastry

350g unsalted butter, melted

700g unsalted pistachios, finely chopped

For the syrup

rind of one lime

450g caster sugar

500ml water

a squeeze of lime juice

2 tbsp rosewater

Make the syrup first and refrigerate.  Boil the sugar, water and lime juice together for 10 mins.  Add the rose water and cooked for a further few seconds.  Add the lime rind.  Set aside to cool then refrigerate.

Brush a large rectangular roasting tin with melted butter and lay half the sheets o filo on top of each other, brushing with melted butter between each sheet.  Spread the nuts on top, fold the overlapping pastry over and cover with the rest of the filo, tucking in the overlap around the edges and butter each sheet as before.

Using a sharp knife, cut the patry into parallel diagonal lines about 1 ½ inches apart.  Bake for 25 mins, then reduce the heat to 150 degrees, and bake for another 25 mins until crisp and golden.

Remove the baklava from the oven and pour the syrup all over so that it soaks through the pastry.  Set aside to cool before serving. 

Where the wild things are - the first blackberries

C and I went blackberry hunting this morning.  It has been a hot summer and not enough rain, so there were only a few little black fruit, not the large jet like bulbous fruit you sometimes find.  

Blackberries growing in the hedgerow

Enough for a blackberry and apple crumble with some of the wind fall apples from the garden though.  I'll try and find a recipe, and add it to the blog.

The final cache of blackberries

Bärenfang: an experiment in honey liqueur

Following recent investigations into cooking with honey, which led to the German honey liqueur, Bärenfang (so obscure that I have yet to find anyone German who knows of it), I decided to try and make my own.

Anyway, this was my version.  It is, it is fair to say, quite, nice.  And may become a cooking ingredient.  I made the mistake of using the cheapest vodka I could find, which smelt of surgical spirit.  Better to use something a little bit nicer.

Home made Bärenfang (lit, Bear trap)


1 medium bottle of vodka (not the cheapest)
a teaspoon of orange flower water
50g sugar
half a jar of orange blossom honey

Warm the vodka on a very low heat and add the honey, sugar and orange flower water.  Stir until the sugar and honey have dissolved.  Pour into bottles and keep in the freezer.  It is a pale yellow colour, not bad but fair to say a little strange.

Wild hazelnuts, beech nuts and cobnuts

It is the season of nuts at the moment.   A few weeks ago we found wild hazelnuts growing along the edge of the river in Wiltshire.

Wild hazelnuts

Hazelnut trees in the hedgerows

Another edible nut, beech nuts (from the beech tree we gathered leaves to make gin for earlier in the year) are also beginning to ripen and scatter their fruit all over the lawn.

Scattered beech nuts

The ones that have fallen are all a little unripe, but when they're ready the nuts have a sweet, morish taste and look so beautiful in the silky open shells (below).  The squirrels love them as well.

Fallen beech nuts (still a little unripe)

Finally, cobnuts are also in season, but not in our garden.  I found a box in the market, and brought them home in celebration  - fantastic.

I've also found a site online - Allen's Farm in Kent, that grows and sells them, and also has some recipes.

Fresh cobnuts

A last summer supper

Autumn has begun to return to London.  

Last night I noticed for the first time that the evenings were beginning to draw in slightly, and the rain was plastering the first of the Plane tree leaves onto the pavement.  However, the sun had still been shining when I'd done my shopping so O and I had a very summery supper - courgette salad with avocado and truffle oil pasta with Portobello mushrooms, and lovely aromatic Gewürztraminer wine.  But there were also Discovery apples, briefly in season on sale in the market, and I couldn't resist buying a few, so we had these with cheese and olive bread from Pain Quotidien.  Their white flesh is stained beautifully pink in places, and they have a scent that reminds me so much of autumn, in a ripe, joyous sort of way. 

Anyway, these are the (very simple) recipes. 

Courgette and avocado salad with pea tops

This serves two.

one good, organic courgette

half a bag of pea tops

one ripe organic avocado 

rind and juice of half an (unwaxed) lemon

a couple of table spoons of good extra virgin olive oil

Maldon salt and pepper to taste

a few sprigs of fresh lemon thyme

Slice the courgette into 5mm thin slices length ways.  Place on a hot but un-oiled griddle pan.  Cook for about 5 mins and then turn once the first side has blackened strips appearing.  Cook the same on the other side and than take off heat.

Place a handful of the pea tops on each plate and then slice half the avocado onto each plate.  I cut each from almost the top and spread out like a fan, but do however you think looks nice. 

When the courgette slices have cooled enough to handle, slice each in half lengthways, and then arrange over the top of the avocado.  Grate the lemon over the top of each plate, squeeze a little juice over, sprinkle with the thyme leaves (the leaves from two sprigs is enough for each plate), and then a glug of olive oil.  Finish with Maldon salt and pepper to taste. 

Truffle pasta with Portobello mushrooms

 I used fresh white pasta for this - but dried would also be fine.  This also serves two.

1 bag of fresh pasta (tagliatelle is good)

1 jar of good quality truffle sauce

four Portobello mushrooms

a little butter (25g) to cook the mushrooms

a glug of white wine 

a glug of good extra virgin olive oil

Cook the pasta in boiling water for 3 - 4 mins until soft.  While cooking the pasta, heat the butter in a griddle pan and add the mushrooms whole.  Cook well on both sides until the mushrooms start to bronze, but not until they dry up.  I find they sometimes need pressing down a bit with a fork to cook properly.  Set aside. 

When the pasta is ready drain and then stir through the truffle sauce, a glug of white wine and also of olive oil and salt and pepper.  This is very much to taste, so just add a little, see how it tastes then if needs be add more of anything. 

We were too full for pudding, so spent the rest of the evening watching MacGuyver instead.

Nigel Slater's baked peppers with a herb dressing

Last night we roasted some cheap red peppers and served them warm in a herby olive oil dressing based on this recipe by Nigel Slater.  I only had half the herbs so had to improvise using coriander instead of oregano and a little balsamic vinegar, but it was still delicious.  A good recipe. 

Nigel Slater's Roasted Peppers with a herb dressing

4 large peppers

olive oil

The dressing

Good handful of basil leaves

a small handful of oregano leaves

a handful of mint leaves
a plump clove of garlic, peeled

150ml extra-virgin olive oil

Cut the peppers in half, remove the seeds and cores and lay cut-side up in a baking tin.  Splash over a little olive oil over and bake at 180 degrees until the skins have blackened. Remove from the oven and cover with a tea towel or clingfilm (to make it easier to remove the skins).

Put the basil leaves into a blender with the oregano and mint, the peeled clove of garlic and the olive oil. Add a good pinch of sea salt and mix till almost smooth.

Peel the skins of the peppers and put them on a plate. Trickle the herb sauce around them and serve warm.

Fresh apples from the garden

It is British apple season and our Discovery apples are finally ripening and falling off the tree and into the long grass.  Their taste is so beautiful, fresh a crisp.  I just wanted to put in a few photographs of their mottled beauty.

Green beans and savory

We had some old green beans to use up for supper tonight, so I decided to experiment with savory and see if it improved the beans - it did!  

An easy recipe to make green beans interesting, if like me you find them dull boiled.

Green beans and savory


a packet of green beans (topped and tailed)
olive oil
a teaspoon of savory
salt and pepper to taste

Heat a heavy based griddle pan and add the oil.
Wait until really hot and then drop in the washed, topped and tailed green beans.  Stir for a couple of minutes and then add the savory and seasoning to taste.

Continue to stir on the heat for a couple more minutes until the beans start to blacken slightly.
Serve hot or cold as a salad.

Possibly the best hot chocolate ...

At the weekend O took me to Holländische Kakao-Stube, an old fashioned Dutch coffee house and patisserie in Hanover, founded in 1896.

We had little cups of dark, sweet hot chocolate topped with cream and chocolate flakes.  Not the grainy instant chocolate in the UK, but delicious and rich, silky and dark.  I had drunk all of mine and eaten my Florentine biscuit before thinking to take a photograph.  All that remained was O's chocolate torte, so I include a photo of this instead.

Nigella Lawson's figs in rum

Back in July I found a jar of  baby figs in syrup which were delicious spooned over quark or marscapone.  Anyway, today I was looking through one of the best baking cookery books - How to Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson, and came across a recipe for them.

These are the black figs I found on sale, stacked up on one of the fruit stalls on the market, and will eventually store the jar in the larder next to the beech leaf gin, sloe gin and cherry kirsch.


Nigella Lawson's figs in rum syrup

1 kg of black figs
500g caster sugar
500ml water
75ml white rum (plus two tbps more as needed)
a one litre jar

Wash and carefully dry the figs and set aside in a colander.

Put the sugar and water in a large pan and bring slowly to the boil so that the sugar has dissolved before the liquid reaches boiling point.

Let the syrup bubble for 15 mins and then take off the heat.  Add the 75ml of rum and gently follow with the figs.  Swill the pan so that the figs are more or less covered and cook at a simmer for 1 1/2 hours with the lid on at an angle so that not to much liquid evaporates, and nor does it bubble over.

Stir every so often to turn the figs gently to ensure all parts are equally cooked.

Place the figs into the clean preserving jar and then return to juices back on to the heat and let them boil for 10 mins to reduce further.  Remove from the heat, add the further two tbsps of rum and pour over the figs.  Add more rum if needed to cover the figs.  Close the lid and leave in a dark, cool place for 6 weeks at least, and up to 6 months.

How to eat figs in rum once they're ready: here with quark and almonds

Nigel Slater, broad-beans and Gorgonzola

This is a Nigel Slater recipe and how fantastic, three of my favourite things: broad beans, mint and Gorgonzola.  Yum.

This apparently serves two with bread, but I think I could eat it all myself.

Mint, growing feral over the gravel

Nigel Slater's broad-bean and Gorgonzola lunch

250g young broad beans in their pods

5tbsp olive oil

250ml water

4 generous sprigs of mint

For the dressing:

90g Gorgonzola

200g natural yoghurt

6-8 finely chopped mint leaves 6-8

Fresh crusty bread to serve

Wash the beans then cut off their tough stalks. Put the beans into a shallow pan with a lid with the olive oil, water and a good grinding of sea salt. Tuck in the mint sprigs. 

Bring the pan to the boil, then turn down the heat so the beans simmer gently, and cover with a lid.  Leave for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to check for tenderness. Turn off the heat and leave for 10 minutes.

To make the dressing, crumble the cheese into the yoghurt, and add the finely shredded mint leaves and black pepper to taste. Serve the beans warm with dollops of the yoghurt and crusty bread, drizzling with the pan juices.  Fantastic.

Making the perfect merignues

I tried to make mjerignues the other day with the left over egg whites from the raspberry ripple ice cream.  They were good enough for my cousin's young children to wolf down two each, heavily covered in cream and raspberries, but were hardly the beautiful, floating clouds of sweet lightness that merignes are supposed to be.

Better than following my recipe, follow the guide to making the perfect meringue in the Guardian online.

Meringues set out on tin foil (much better to use rice paper or greaseproof, but that was all we had in the drawer)

The finished meringues in a tin - I used golden caster sugar so they had a slight colour to them.

Meringue, Eton Mess ice cream and raspberries.

Nutmeg, narcotics and potato dauphinoise

The latest herb I have reached on my mission to cover all those on the 1970's wall chart is actually a spice: 'Nutmeg'.  I've been doing some research.

The name is a generic term for any of the many species of trees in the genus Myristica.  One which is commonly used for commercial nutmeg is Myristica fragrans, which is a large, tropical evergreen tree with dark grey-green bark, thickly branched with a dense foliage of dark-green oval leaves.  The tree blossoms with little, pale yellow bell-shaped flowers, which produce a yellow fruit, grooved like an apricot.  This splits along the grove when ripe to allow the seed to fall.

This beautiful fruit is actually composed to two spices: mace and nutmeg.  The dark-brown nutmeg seed is wound around with lines of red mace, encased in the lighter yellow fruit.  The centre of the seed is also interesting, pale flesh zig-zagged across with dark lines, visible as you start to grate.

The nutmeg fruit with the mace and nutmeg visible

The trees thrived in the rich volcanic soils and humid conditions of the Moluccas (the Spice Islands).  Although the originally grew only on the carefully guarded islands of Bada and Amdonia, the species soon spread across the East Indies to the Caribbean.  It even grew so successfully in Grenada that the country's flag was designed to emulate the green, yellow and red of the nutmeg - and includes an image of a nutmeg in one corner.

Grenada's flag, nutmeg icon on the left

Historically, nutmeg has also been reputed to have magical properties and was used as an amulet to protect against evil, often worn around the neck sometimes with a silver grater.  As a medicine it is reputed to aid digestion and improve the appetite, and like Savory was also reputed to be an aphrodisiac.  

Nutmeg's flavour and fragrance comes from the oil of myristica, which contains a narcotic - myristicin - which induces delirium.  Nutmeg has been taken in large quantities as a recreational drug, although perhaps not one of the more entertaining ones. 

When we were younger Nutmeg was something we used to flavour hot milk and apple pies.  The wall chart also suggests baked goods, pudding, cauliflower and spinach, but I've decided to include Nadine Abensur's recipe for Gratin Dauphanois, one of my favourite recipes, and (like salade au chevre chaud) one of my fall backs in French restaurants.

Gratin Dauphanois

1 kg of waxy potatoes
300ml double cream
pinch of freshly ground nutmeg
50g finely sliced onion
15g butter
75g grated Gruyere cheese

Cut the potatoes very finely into 3 mm discs.  Pat the slices dry and and mix with the cream, nutmeg, garlic, salt and pepper and the slice onion. Use the butter to grease an oveproof dish 6cm deep. Press most of the potato moixture firmly into the dish finishing up with the reserve slices on top. Sprinkle with the grated Gruyere and pake for 1 hour until the top is browned at 180 degrees.  When I make it, I'll add some photos.

Home made raspberry ripple ice-cream

There are several ice-cream flavours that make me nostalgic for childhood holidays in Devon Coast.  One is mint chip-chop chip (well described by David Lebovitz in his blog) and another is raspberry ripple.  I guess a third I have not seen since I was seven is tutti frutti (sic), but I always regarded that as a little suspect with it's strange nondescript sweet flavour and hard sweet lumps that may have been crystallised fruit.  

Anyway, when the raspberries are in glut we never manage to eat them all before the start to collapse and go off.  A few weeks ago, in order to save a batch we had been given by G, I made an approximated raspberry coulis with some syrupy strawberry jam sitting in the fridge.  And today it found a use as the crimson swirl of raspberry in the ice-cream.


This recipe is from the Waitrose website, amended slightly by me, as ever. 


Raspberry ripple ice-cream


568ml carton of double cream
300ml whole milk
1/2 vanilla pod, split
6 large organic free-range egg yolks
50g caster sugar
300g raspberries
icing sugar

Put the cream, milk and vanilla pod in a heavy-based pan and heat until just below boiling point.  Be warned, I burnt the bottom of the pan, which gave the whole ice-cream a faintly burnt taste which I intend to pretend is intentional and very modern.

Remove the cream from the heat and allow to cool slightly.  Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl until thick and creamy.  (I forgot to do this, it doesn't matter terribly).

When the cream mixture has cooled at least to room temperature, place in a bowl over a pan of gently boiling water.  Sir in the egg yolk mixture (and sugar if not already mixed in), whisking constantly.  Heat the bowl very gently, stirring until the custard thickens enough to lightly coat the back of a wooden spoon.  This can take anything between 12 mins and half an hour depending on how low the heat is.

Making the custard

 Strain the custard into a clean bowl and leave to freeze.  It will need periodically stirring as it freezes to break up the ice crystals, if you don't have an ice-cream maker.

Meanwhile, purée the raspberries with a blender.  Sieve to remove the pips.  If the purée tastes tart, sweeten with a little icing sugar (more than you think - things always taste less sweet when frozen).

Raspberry purée, lovely crimson colour

When the ice-cream has about half frozen, and is slushy but not solid, spoon the raspberry purée through the thickened mixture, not so much that it becomes a uniform pink, just enough to fill the beautiful yellow custard with vermilion swirls.  Freeze overnight, and take out about 1/2 hour before needed to allow to soften.

The ice cream, swirled with raspberry