Elderberry and damson crumble - Where has all the time gone?

Elderberries

 I’m actually scared how fast time goes by. Autumn snuck up so quickly and winter is doing much the same. It’s bloody dark in the morning for Pete’s sake. I’ve really not made the most of the damson season that is drawing rapidly to a close as I write. I had the best intentions of making damson vodka, damson fragipane… Guess I’ll have to shelf those ideas till next year. I hope they aren’t too dusty in there. Chatting to one of my oldest chums at the weekend we were in such astonishment that we hadn’t seen each other in two months that she checked her diary. Sure enough, we hadn’t seen each other. All that time had gone by and what had I done? Eat, sleep, work, moan, holiday, hoover, kiss, walk, cook, natter, laugh…

Damsons

My Mum forwarded me Steve Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford University in 2005 and these words resonated greatly with me, “remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only is what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I guess our time is so precious here on this “pale blue dot”. Death and change really are the only constants. I’m going to make the effort to be more aware of my time and then maybe I wont miss the damson season next year (and might actually do something useful with my evening).

This is a lovely little treat of a recipe. I’ve kept the crumble topping simple, almost like shortbread, to really show off the flavour of the fruit and berries. Elderberries are also a great way to get into foraging as they are easy to recognise and hugely common.

Damson and elderberry crumble with a bit of vanilla ice cream

Elderberry and Damson crumble – serves 4 – 6

Oven preheated to 180°C

For the fruit filling -

600g damsons

100g elderberries (about 10 heads of berries)

70g caster sugar

For the crumble topping -

100g plain flour

40g caster sugar

50g butter (at room temperature)

De-stone the damsons if you so wish.

Add the damsons, elderberries, sugar and a splash of water to a pan over a moderate heat.

Whilst the fruit is cooking make the crumble mix by rubbing the flour and butter together until you get an even, sandy texture.

Add the sugar to the flour and butter mixture and stir.

Stir occasionally till the damsons are soft.

Once the fruit has cooked add more sugar to taste as required.

Add the fruit mixture to an ovenproof dish and add the crumble topping to the top of it and gently pat down.

Cook for 15 – 20 minutes until light golden brown.

Serve with ice cream or crème fraiche.

Enjoy.

Chanterelle pappardelle

chanterelle papparadelle

Life has been very busy recently. I’ve been so caught up with seeing friends I’ve barely had time to sit, think and just be still. It’s been fantastic but by Sunday we both needed to slow it down. Mushroom hunting was the order of the day. We drove away from the city, listening to radio 4 and munching on lemon sherbet sweeties. It was nice just getting to spend a bit of time together.

On reaching the wood we pushed our way through a thicket of nettles and wild raspberries. Once inside it was truly beautiful. Natural, untouched silver birch, pillows of deep sphagnum moss and little shafts of light coming through to hit the forest floor. It was the perfect terroir. It wasn’t the long before we spotted our first chanterelles half hidden away under moss and branches. The ruse of the fallen silver birch leaves often catching us out.

lovely looking chanterelles

We only spent about an hour in the wood but that hour was so restorative. For me there can me few simple pleasures as wonderful as finding your own food especially when it is as tasty as chanterelles. Maybe my enjoyment of foraging is some throwback to some primal instinct but that little bit of time out helped me put a few things in perspective. I felt better.

All our lovely "chanties"

Chanterelle pappardelle – serves 2

150g pappardelle

teaspoon of oil

6 strips of streaky bacon or pancetta

100-300g chanterelles, trimmed and cleaned with the largest ones quartered

2 cloves of garlic, paper like skin still left on

3 sprigs of thyme

30g butter

100ml double cream

handful of chopped flat leaf parsley

½ lemon

sea salt and pepper

Add the oil and bacon to a skillet pan.

Cook until brown and crispy on a moderately high heat.

Remove from the pan and set aside on kitchen paper.

Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the packet with plenty of salted water.

You may need to drain some of the oil from the pan. You will only need about 1 tablespoon worth of oil.

Add the chanterelles in small batches to the pan, making sure there is plenty of space between them so that they don’t stew.

Add the garlic and some of the thyme.

If the pan gets too dry add a knob of butter.

Cook the mushrooms until they are pleasantly soft but coloured. This takes a few minutes.

Season with sea salt to taste.

Once each batch is cooked remove the chanterelles from the pan and squeeze a little lemon juice over them and set aside till later.

Once all the mushrooms are cooked add the cream to the pan, give it a good stir to get the flavour-filled bits off the bottom of the pan.

Allow the cream to boil and reduce down so that it thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.

Remove the garlic and thyme.

Add the bacon and chanterelles to the pan for 1 minute then stir in the parsley and drained pasta.

Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Enjoy.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino salad

The weather hasn’t even been remotely summery today but I'm keen to make the most of all the amazing produce that is available currently. Eating seasonally means that in the winter months our diet consists of lots of leeks and brassicas. Enjoyable, but after a few months the novelty can begin to wear off and the excitement of the summer vegetable cousins coming to stay starts to settle in. Oh yummy asparagus, broad beans, peas, courgette flowers….

Broad beans 

Broad beans remind me so much of summer. My grandpa had a small vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Tomatoes, little gem lettuce and raspberries were the main staples but he would often dabble in a season of this and that. Runner beans one year, broad beans the next. Walking barefoot on the hot, rough slabs down to the bottom of his garden then eating his home grown delights straight off the bushes is one of my earliest and most enduring memories. The year was punctuated by different crops and I think it is this that has given me an appreciation of nature and seasonality.

Broad beans

Eating by the seasons wasn’t something my grandparents and their generation thought about, it was just the way things were. They weren’t eating broad beans in June because it was a trendy, middle class thing to do. They did it because that was option available. Today, in our world of readily available non native food such as bananas, broad beans can be quite tricky to get hold of in their short 8 week window. Some supermarkets stock them but your best bet is greengrocers or farmers markets. I got some today and was determined to make the most of them.

Broad beans, pecorino sardo and crusty bread - hello lunch

I’ll always remember my Grandma telling me about her first taste of bananas. Transatlantic shipping recommenced after the Second World War and it was then that my Grandma had her first taste of banana. She would have been about 15. Today 95% of British household buy them on a weekly basis. They are available all year round in every supermarket. Not exotic. Not exotic at all. The Oxford dictionary defines exotic as ‘‘strikingly unusual”. I guess you could perhaps now argue that the broad bean is more exotic than the banana?  Even if you disagree, it is difficult to class a banana as exotic despite the average 5106 food miles it has traveled to arrive on our plates.

Anyways rant over.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Serves 2

300g of broad bean pods

2 handfuls of pea shoots

50g pecorino sardo shards

juice of 1 lemon

good glug of olive oil, nice and grassy ideally

salt and pepper to taste

Remove the broad beans from their thick pods and boil in salted water for 3 minutes.

Personally I tend to then remove the beans from their inner casing mainly because I find it too bitter. I will not judge you for leaving it on. It is your diner, not mine, after all.

Mix all the other ingredients together.

I served the salad on top of some crusty bread brushed with more olive oil and then griddled on a high heat till crisp.

Enjoy.

Tip top saturday lunch - duck egg, asparagus and brown shrimp

Asparagus, duck eggs and brown shrimp

This week has been one for first time adventures. 

1 - I went to the wonderful Turkish restaurant Empires, for Z's birthday. I've been meaning to go for about 3 years. I’m always tardy.

2 - I've had my cooking filmed (just weird).

3 - I cracked my duck egg virginity. Pardon the pun, genuinely sorry, couldn’t resist. 

Duck egg with asparagus and brown shrimp

The filming was for a friend of a friend so I was happy to help out but gees was it weird. I’m so used to just being an idiot in the kitchen, dancing around, singing badly, somehow I didn’t feelcomfortable doing that with someone I had just met for the first time. I wonder if that is how Delia feels when the film crew is in her home? Does she also dance to 80s tunes in her bare feet? 

On to the duck eggs. Yep I've never had one before today. It took me 3 Stockbridge deli's before Mr Bower the butcher came up trumps with the eggy gold.  If you have never had them before, they really were lovely. The egg white was meant to be denser but to be honest I never noticed any difference. My only observations were that it is slightly larger than a large hen's egg, and the yolk was more rich and buttery. Yolk was all that was needed to dress this dish. Who needs a hollandaise when you have a runny duck egg yolk?

Fried duck eggs

Duck egg with asparagus and brown shrimp - serves 2 as a light lunch

The recipe was based on a dish in Mark Hix's "British Seasonal Food"

2 duck eggs

140g asparagus spears

60g cooked brown shrimp or potted shrimp

veg oil

seasoning

Boil the asparagus in a pan of salted water for 2-3 minutes depending on the thickness. 

In the mean time heat a frying pan on a medium to low heat with a little oil and add the eggs. 

Spoon over any excess oil over the eggs, to cook the top of them.

Add the shrimp to the eggs.

Drain the asparagus and add to the eggs.

Season.

Serve and enjoy.

Tip top saturday lunch - asparagus, duck egg and brown shrimp

Princess and the pea soup

Broad beans

Ok, I admit there are no peas in this soup (but there are broad beans) and needless to say I am not a princess. I guess I wanted to tempt you, ma bad. Essentially this soup is a kind of minestrone except when I think of minestrone I think of horrible thick, sludgy reddish stuff we used to get at school. This is a much classier affair, light and tasty.

Last week I was away with old friends in Gozo, a tiny island in the Mediterranean. So quiet and beautiful. On walks in the area surrounding the farmhouse we saw little terraced fields; rows of broad beans, asparagus and spring onions all together in neat lines, baked by the sun. I guess my exploring of this little corner of “our pale blue dot” inspired me with this dish. It truly was a charming place; wild artichokes in the hedgerows, the clearest waters and outrageously good seafood. 

      courgette, broad beans and asparagus

This is a nice little diner dish, it is really quick if you don’t bother peeling the broad beans. However, my perfectionist tendencies won over. I think I've been watching too much “Great British Menu”. It took me ages but personally I found it therapeutic. I'm sad that way. Any left over roast chicken it would make a welcome addition to this dish.

princess and the pea soup, spring green minestrone

Princess and the pea soup - serves 2

800ml chicken stock

2 handfuls of orzo pasta

8 asparagus spears

6 baby courgettes

2 handfuls of broad beans

4-5 spring onions, finely chopped

Seasoning

In a pan, heat the heat stock up to a rolling boil.

Add in the pasta, it will take about 8 minutes to cook.

Add in the vegetables after about 5 minutes or so depending on their size.

After 7 minutes add spring onions.

Season to taste.

Enjoy.