A Plum(b) Gooden! .......the beauty of home made gifts.

'A plumb gooden'...... An American phrase to which the Irish translation would read....'absolutely wonderful' which perfectly describes home made gifts....and their makers!

Being on the receiving end of home made gifts is fabulous, especially when they are edible ones! you can taste the love and care that has gone into them. On the other hand, making edible gifts for friends, acquaintances or work colleagues is a good idea, they may take some time but it removes the stress of what to get so and so for their secret Santa, or whatever, without spending a fortune, and lets be honest, everyone loves home made!

Over the next 2 weeks I'll be posting a few recipes that make perfect gifts. They will be easy to make and tasty......of course! Some will have the convenience of being 'keepers', which means you can make them well in advance and they will last well into the new year...if they can be resisted that is!... and some last minute treats that can be enjoyed on Christmas eve or even Christmas morning.....and, if you are imaginative with your packaging and presentation, you will be king, or queen, of the Secret Santa tub, neighbourhood, street, bridge club....or your great auntie Gertrude!

But to start you off, here's the recipe for my 'Plum Gooden' Chutney, it is 'absolutely wonderful' and a change from the usual cranberry preserve that dominates Christmas meals....This chutney goes great with pate, on a boxing day morning cold turkey and stuffing sandwich, as a topping to melted camembert or a crottin of goats cheese, cold ham, and meat terrines.....and it's particularly tasty with smoked salmon or mackerel....my personal favourite!

Click HERE for the recipe or jump to my previous post.

Plum Gooden Chutney

This 'Plum Gooden' Chutney is 'absolutely wonderful' and a change from the usual cranberry preserve that dominates Christmas meals. It goes great with pate, with your Christmas roast bird, on a boxing day morning cold turkey and stuffing sandwich, as a topping to melted camembert or a crottin of goats cheese in a tart or galette, with cooked cold ham, meat terrines, quiche.....and it's particularly tasty with smoked salmon or with mackerel....my personal favourite!

You might think that now the summer is over that fresh, ripe plums may be hard to come by, home grown ones maybe yes, unless you grew your own then froze them, but now that summer has reached the southern hemisphere and the sun has returned to the equator, fruits from those warmer countries is now landing on our shores. For this years batch of chutney I found it very easy to get plums and at the ready price of less than 2 euros a kilo!

The chutney is relatively easy to make if you don't mind a bit of chopping at first and don't mind
being patient while it is cooking.
Choose good quality ingredients....ripe  but still firm plums, plump sultanas and fresh onions and apples, and a good quality red wine vinegar.
Once stored in jars in a cool larder, your chutney will keep unopened for months, but once open it still keeps extremely well in the refrigerator for a good week or more.
How many jars you can fill from the recipe depends on the jars used, but I can get about 8 - 10  228ml jars from a batch

Snowy Winter Frosting

This simple wintry white frosting is the perfect topping for not just carrot cakes...see carrot cake recipe HERE! ... it's also great as a basic frosting or filling for using say in a victoria sponge cake with a layer a raspberry jam, or in a lemon or orange cake with the addition of some lemon and orange flavourings. You can just replace the vanilla extract with any other flavour....you can even do coffee, lime, or try using liqueurs such as creme de menthe, grand marnier, Baileys...this list is endless so be adventurous and experiment with your favourite flavours. Changing your flavours means you can also change your colours...add a drop of red colour for baby pink etc.

Baby Bunny Carrot Cakes

The best thing about the holiday season, apart from all the delicious foods and the tidings of joy and peace, is the abundance of visitors to the house, some people are well organised (practice etiquette) and book their visit, and others tend to just turn up out of the blue whenever it suits them. So at this time of year it's best to be like a boy scout......be prepared!.

Carrot cake is known for being a moist delumptious (a cross between delicious and scrumptious) cake, which keeps very well and for ages either in an airtight container in a cool place or in the refrigerator. You can serve it plain or you can whip up a little seasonal snowy frosting to top it off.
I like to make carrot cake as these little individual cakes, perfect for baby bunnies, so no messing about cutting slices and worrying about portion sizes, you just plonk a cake down on each persons plate.
It may seem like an horrific amount of oil in the recipe, but really, you're not meant to eat the whole lot at once!, and anyway, I would only use good heart healthy oils!
The addition of a ripe banana bumps up the sweetness naturally so in actual fact could call this a low processed sugar recipe....put that in your diet book and eat it! just stick to the rule, everything in moderation, and enjoy...it's Christmas after all.

Leftover Mincemeat?........ Fast, Festive Fruit Bread

Christmas at home is all about tradition, from the baking of our cake, the choosing of the perfect pyramid shaped tree, to the duck spring roll and mini pizza canapes, washed down with Kir Royal's as we open our gifts. Now I'm all for tradition, but sometimes tradition can go just a bit too far for my liking!

Christmas traditionalist cooks would maintain that one must make ones own mincemeat, well that's all very well Delia, but between you and me, I can't be bothered with all the faffing about sorting through fruits and cutting up apples, bottling it up and patiently waiting for it to mature which usually takes to the following Christmas! especially as I go through gallons of the stuff in the run up to the big day.
So why not buy it? There are so many excellent mincemeat's on the market, does one really want the bother of making ones own anymore? I think not! The only issue you might have with shop bought mincemeat is that you might find yourself left with some at the bottom of the jar and this festive offering gets rid of those last couple of tablespoons nicely.

If you are a fan of the Irish traditional Halloween barmbrack, then you are gonna love this! Don't be disappointed though when you cant find the ring or a coin, because there won't be any in it...it's not a christmas cracker!

A Tagine on a Tuesday!.....Sweet & Spicy Pork Tagine

Tagines are the simple yet complex flavoured one pot dishes of Morocco, a country in Northern Africa. Over the centuries the foods of Morocco have been influenced by both its natives, and its invaders. The Berbers were the indigenous peoples of the region, but the country has been influenced by the Bedouin nomadic tribes of the dessert, the Arabs, the Ottomans, the Moors from Spain, Sephardic Jews and finally the French. Yet among all this dilution of their culture, the original Berbers managed to maintain their cultural origins and right proud they are of them too.

The Tagine is a classic Berber dish, it is also the name of the pot the stew is cooked or served in.

A Tagine is basically a glorified stew of either meat, fish or vegetables, but it is a stew that is aromatic and thick, filled with the scents of sweetness and spice. The meat is tender, the fish, melt in the mouth, and the vegetables more flavourful than any curry. Tagines will also have the addition of fruits such as apricots, dates, prunes, olives and preserved lemons, with lots of strong flavours such as coriander and harissa, but also the sweetness of honey.

Bagging A Lidl Bargain......the 49c Butternut Squash!

I do love a bargain, and in my life there is no room for 'supermarket snobbery' as I call it!
If I see an offer on things I know I will use then off I will trot, regardless of the establishment!
You may be of the opinion that Lidl does not offer the 'bells and whistles' of other supermarkets, and if you are thinking in terms of self service automated checkouts (which I detest) and butchery counters (where the meat has arrived vacuum packed anyway) then you are correct, but Lidl does what it does in a way that I, as a chef, cannot argue with...... and at a significant lesser cost to the buyer! so much so that there are other supermarkets that I simply do not bother to frequent any more.
Hot off the shelves this week, amongst other great bargains, were the 49c butternut squash...yes...49c for a butternut squash and no, they weren't tiny! they were of standard size and a great buy.

Blue Monday after 'Black Friday'.... Smoky Fish Cakes with Dill & Caper Cream

The United States of America has been a great influence in my life, not only on my ancestral heritage, but on many of my attitudes, beliefs and ideals, I am a 'Disney' child after all, a member of that first generation to be raised on a diet of mass media, the target of global corporate marketing techniques, and consistently force fed a mantra of 'thou shalt consume'.

I have never really been one for regular shopping as the majority of the population seem to do, and unless I've been in dire need of something, I tend to avoid the 'shopping mall'.....and yes! I DID need that set of double sided plain and fluted pastry cutters I bought last week, but my obsession with cookie cutters is another story!.......
Instead of queuing for the latest 50 inch screen 4K television or mobile phone with the gadget thingy that can turn your oven on and compile your weekly shopping list by talking to your refrigerator, when it comes to shopping, I am the one making a beeline for the kitchen equipment and home-ware department, and if I do buy something, I will always make good use of it!

Bakewell Bundt ....with cherry & pear

Following on from my previous post of pear tart, when you've got a handle on a basic recipe such as the frangipan, it is amazing how much further you can expand on it by using your imagination.

For this recipe I increased the quantities of the basic frangipan recipe and made one and a half times the recipe amount, then I decided to add 2 pear halves that I had left over from the pear tarts, and, because I love cherry bakewell tart, I simply had to have some glace cherries in the mix....the pears, cherries and ground almonds give a deliciously moist cake.
I added a little orange extract to the mix too as I am of the opinion that orange goes very well with almonds....call it the Mallorca effect!.....the island of Mallorca is famous for almonds and oranges.

Just to make my cake a little more exciting and aesthetically interesting I have used a medium sized bundt cake tin. You can get bundt tin in small individual sizes like a muffin cup....I found some wonderful silicon ones in Lidl, other sizes are available in most good cook shops or online.....medium sized tins are around 7 inches across and 4 deep, or you can get the classic bundt tin which is anything from 8 to 10 inches wide and very deep like, 6 inches or so, but that's an awful lot of cake, unless you are having a party or have a big family to feed!
As I am using cherries, poached pears and orange extract, I have reduced the amount of castor sugar needed as there will be sufficient additional sweetness from the cherries etc.

A Pear Tart From A Pear Tree

The harvest season has almost passed us by, and apart from the root vegetables still snug in their clay beds and the wintering cabbages which are in their youth, the poly-tunnel has pretty much given up its goods.
The bean plants which have dropped most of their leaves are beginning to shrivel but there is still the odd bean hanging around here and there, the tomato plants which eventually turned into a jungle, are still laden with fruit but it looks like we will be having fried green tomatoes or green tomato salsa as there ain't no way on earth they are going to ripen at this point!.

Elderberries

We have reached the end of our growing season so now we will be concentrating on preserving as much as we can to enjoy during the dark winter months. Apples have been made into pies and frozen, spiced apple chutneys, apple sauce, and apple jellies have been bottled, jams have been made, pears have been 'put up' as they say in the preserving community, and the other day I noticed the elderberry bushes are heavily laden, their fruits just ripe for the picking, so that will be my next project.....I feel elderberry cordial or ice-cream coming on.

Even if you have no growing space and have to get your fruit from the supermarket, it is a great idea to have some preserved fruits on hand, be they bottled as jams, frozen 'au naturel', cooked in syrup or even preserved in alcohol...bottles of which make great christmas gifts by the way......have you ever had peaches in brandy?  hashtag YUM!
Make the most of those 49p or 49c supermarket offers when you get them. If you see pears or apples, or any other sturdy fruit, and I do see them on offer quite frequently where you can get about 6 pieces of fruit in a punnet or a bag for 49p, then make the most of these offers by buying in bulk and doing something with them......no one said you were only allowed to eat them fresh from the fruit bowl!

Something Old, Something New! A Recipe For Perfectly Sweet, Sweet Pastry

When I first started out on the road to becoming a chef.... and I still haven't reached my destination yet by the way!.....like any other chef, as I began to gather skills and experiences from other more skilled professionals, I also began to gather recipes, but this as far as I can tell is normal practice in our profession. Ask any chef and they will probably have their own favourite recipes too, those tried and trusted basics that they can rattle off the list of ingredients to and most likely make with their eyes closed. These are the recipes we know are fail-safe and will never let us down, even during the busiest of services.

I too began my own compendium of recipes and tips. Some were truly reliable and others I altered from their original source to suit my own tastes and needs. Eventually through years of experimentation I developed what I classed as my own creations, they may be called classic names but the quantities of ingredients and how I treat them are pretty much unique to me. Every chef will for example make pastry in their own way. Yes we may all rub fat into flour but we all feel our ingredients differently....some may like their butter to feel firmer, some softer maybe more towards room temperature. Some like the feel of a coarse flour, some a fine flour. No two chefs will rub butter into flour to the exact same point, as we like all humans, we see and feel things differently too.

Christmas is coming...Time to bake that cake!

I am of the opinion, and you may be too, that anyone who says they dislike Christmas cake has simply never had a good one!
Too dry, and you need a gallon of tea to wash it down, too wet or under-cooked, and the stodgy mass resembles the pudding you had for dessert.
Some people dislike the fruit, some the nuts...myself included as I can't abide walnuts...instead I use pecans...problem solved. But the high quantities of dried fruits required means there are no alternatives if you want your cake to be authentic, but still, choosing your proportions of fruits correctly, and choosing good quality, plump fruits, can make a huge difference.

There is something ritualistic and spell binding about the making of the christmas cake, certainly in our house where the task falls to myself and my mother, just as it did to her and my grandmother. It is a joint effort of sorting, cleaning and soaking of fruits, chopping of pecans and cherries, buttering and lining of cake tins and of course....baking not only the cake, but two tiny muffin sized cakes for us to enjoy after our efforts.....the cooks reward!

As we get older and we become ever more health conscious, our appetites seem to decrease as do the size of our Christmas cakes. Last years cake was much shallower and this year I believe I will be on the hunt for a cake tin that is no bigger than 7 inches.....making our cake in a loaf shape doesn't have quite the same appeal so the tin I buy must be round.

For the first time in our living memory, our family Christmas cake, made using a recipe handed down through the generations, will most likely be served without any icing, marzipan or buttercream of any sort.......the last time this happened was probably during rationing in world war II....and why are we leaving it bare? well, as none of us are very fond of royal icing or that paste you can roll out, I tend to ice the cake with a butter icing naughtily spiked with a little Baileys Irish cream liqueur....needless to say butter icing does not last very long and one feels obliged to scoff the cake before the icing becomes inedible....our ageing digestions simply cannot cope with such richness day after day and leaving our cake naked means we can continue to enjoy it well into January!

As we are now well into the first week in November it is time to start planning the baking of your own Christmas cake. The optimum time to bake a fruit cake and ensure it is well matured by Christmas is within the next week or two, anytime after the 20th of November and you are dicing with danger!

For my 'Mary Poppins' as I like to call it, Christmas cake....as in a cake that is practically perfect in every way, we will need pull our socks up and get the ball rolling.....you can find my Christmas Cake recipe HERE!

If you really can't get over your hatred of Christmas cake then never fear, over the next few weeks I will come up with some delightful alternatives that can make your post Christmas lunch cup of tea so divine you won't feel you are missing out.