Plums & Oranges

When I got back from holiday the plums on my Victoria plum tree were falling off the tree, they were so ripe. Now there is a rush against time to process them as quickly as possible to preserve them before it is too late.

One of the quickest recipes I know for using plums is Plum and Orange Mincemeat. It is a slightly odd thing, to make a Christmas recipe in August but now is when the plums are ripe and by Christmas the mincemeat will be nicely matured. So last night I carefully chopped up 3lb of plums and mixed it together with the oranges, dried fruit, sugar, spices and brandy.

This morning I had the rather pleasant task of boiling this delightful mixture up for half and hour to meld the ingredients together into a beautiful mincemeat. Doing so filled the house with gorgeous smells, with a hint of Christmas that wasn't so out of place on a rather dismal August day. Even the girls in the living room were led into the kitchen by their noses, asking, "What are you cooking, Mummy, it smells lovely?"

The only problem with this was the anticipation it building in your body - an expectation to eat something yummy. But alas, the concoction was to be sealed into jars with no more than the final lick of the spoon before the washing up.

So with my mouth expecting something delicious to eat I decided to have a go at making a plum and orange drizzle cake. This, fortunately, managed to fulfill my expectations - it was delicious! While plums are in season, spare a few and have a go at making this cake.

6 oz soft butter

5 oz caster sugar

2 eggs (beaten)

1 orange

9 oz self-raising flour

1 teaspoon mixed spice

5 Victoria plums (ripe)

2 oz sultanas

4 oz icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C. gas 4 and line a 2lb loaf tin. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar then stir in the eggs. Grate the zest off the orange and add this to the bowl. Squeeze out the juice. Set aside 2 tablespoons of orange juice for the drizzle and put the remaining juice into the bowl. Sift in the flour and spice then stir until well combined. Finely chop up 4 of the plums and add this and the sultanas to the cake mixture and fold in. Dollop the mixture into the loaf tin and bake for 1 hour until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Leave to cool completely in the tin. Destone the remaining plum then place it in a blender with the reserved orange juice and blend until smooth. Add the icing sugar and stir. Prick the cake all over with the skewer then pour over the drizzle. Enjoy.

Woburn Abbey Garden Show

The 2nd annual Woburn Abbey Garden Show was held from 12pm Friday 15th July until 5pm Sunday 17th July and this year Jammy Cow preserves joined the other food stalls in the food marquee. The marquee housed a variety of different stalls including cheeses, Indian curry sauces, Texas hot sauces, cupcakes, crisps, stoned ground flour and fudge.

Jammy Cow was slotted between a stall selling cured Continental meats and the local butchers, Woburn Country food. So for two and half days we were teased with the smells of chirozo and freshly cooked sausage samples. Any member of the public wandering through the tent could have foregone lunch after sampling one of everything on offer to taste. A delight of local and exotic flavours.

I often think a weekend inside a marquee at an event like this is like being on the set of a murder mystery drama such as Miss Marple or Midsomer Murders. Thankfully there were no murders but there were definitely the usual mix of eccentric characters and stereotypical gentry. It is all so quintessentially English.

Friday was a warm, dry afternoon but fairly quiet on the custom side of things. Most customers were women of a certain age and retired men. It was a pleasant afternoon, although I had expected to be supplied with a chair as well as a table. I spent most of the afternoon stood up and occasionally sat on the grass behind the stall, resting my aching back. Towards the end of the afternoon my companion Clare went for a walk round the stalls and stopped to chat with the people at the Corkers crisps stall. These are handmade crisps, which easily rival the likes of Kettle or Tyrrells. To my surprise, a moment later the man from Corkers came walking towards our stall with a high stool in his arms. This he gave to me to borrow for the weekend. What a hero! From then on I spent a good many hours perched on that stool, resting my legs and back!

Before leaving on Friday evening, Clare pointed out that the cardboard boxes that housed the extra Jammy Cow stock were getting damp on the ground. For this, we slipped a couple of plastic box lids underneath them and stacked them on top of each other to get as many of them off the ground as possible. This proved to be a particularly fortuitous bit of forethought when the next morning I arrived at the marquee in torrential rain. A few moments after arrival a small trickle of water began flowing in under the edge of the marquee and gradually flowed down the length of the marquee behind every stall on that side of the tent. Then within the next few minutes the trickle turned into a small stream and quickly my canvas boots yielded to the water, soaking my socks. I retreated to the highest piece of ground I could find behind my stall and stood there on the boggy hillock wondering what to do.

As the flow of water became steadily worse a kind of Dunkirk spirit set in amongst the stallholders. Helen from Woburn Country Food lent me 3 large plastic crates to get my stock off the ground, the man at the Indian sauce stall improvised wellies out of two plastic bags and the groundsmen from the Abbey site came in with bags of sand and sheets of hessian to raise the ground level for the worse effected stalls. None of this, of course, stopped us from continuing regardless. Eric merely straddled the steam passing his stall and continued to carve sarroso off the bone and I perched on my borrowed stool, soggy feet resting above the floodwater. What amazed me was that some people actually came out anyway to shop that day.

Sunday was the best day. The weather had calmed down, apart from a playful wind that occasionally tried to whip my cow-print tablecloth away. And the customers were out in force. A busy day, with the stallholders behaving like automatoms in a theme-park ride. Motion-sensitive, as a potential customer walked past we would switch on and play our pre-programmed line:

“Do you know quince?” from ‘Quince Charming’
“Would you like to try a sample of sausage?” from Woburn Country Foods
“Would you like to try some jams or chutneys; all grown in Milton Keynes and made in Milton Keynes,” from Jammy Cow
“Would you like to sample some sarroso off the bone?” from Eric.
And so on down the line.

Then at the end of Sunday it was time to pack it all up and say our goodbyes. I returned the stool and the plastic crates, exchanged business cards and spent a little less money than I took! Hard work, tiring but successful. Many more people aware of the Jammy Cow name, lots of people with Jammy Cow preserves to take away, a few empty boxes for me to take home and pleasant weekend spent in the company of people as passionate about good quality food as I am.

Make your own Ribena

Did you know that Robinsons only use British blackcurrants to make Ribena? I admire them for that but puzzle about how they manage that when British blackcurrants are only available for about a month from late June to late July. Do they just make masses and masses of Ribena at that time of year, store it and dispatch it to the shops throughout the rest of the year? Or do they have massive freezers somewhere and gradually use up frozen blackcurrants through the year?

I don’t know the answer to those questions but for me I use some of my blackcurrants up fresh but freeze others to use through the year, mostly as jam of course. I do, however make one batch a year of blackcurrant cordial, which is, of course, pretty much homemade Ribena. Using lemongrass adds a citrus undertone and adds an air of sophistication to the cordial.

Blackcurrant & Lemongrass Cordial

2 lb 4 oz (1kg) blackcurrants

1 pint (660ml) water

13 oz (375g) granulated sugar

3 lemongrass stems, crushed

Put all the ingredients in a preserving pan and bring to the boil. Boil for about 5 minutes, using a potato masher to crush the berries to release the juices. Leave to infuse for about an hour then bring back to the boil then strain the liquid through a nylon (not metal) sieve. Bottle and refrigerate. Dilute as you would normally for blackcurrant squash. Use up within 3 months.

When I made this cordial last year I bought a bundle of lemongrass stems from the supermarket. The recipe called for 3 and the bundle, annoyingly, had 4 stems. So I decided to try growing the 4th stem. To get it going I placed it in a jar of water for a few weeks until it put out roots then I potted it on into a pot of multipurpose compost. It has sat happily on the windowsill in my conservatory ever since, gradually gaining height and then more stems as the year has passed. I was somewhat surprised to find, a year later, that the plant was actually big enough to stand me harvesting stems from it. Instead of 3 stems, I cut out 2 stems, figuring that fresh stems would probably have more flavour than the slightly dried out ones you buy in the supermarket. I also snipped up the attached leaves too, which although coarse, have a strong smell. Because they are stained out in the recipe the texture is not important. It was very satisfying to make the cordial in the second year from both homegrown blackcurrants and lemongrass.

I have kept one bottle of the cordial but donated another to my friend Clare. She told me she was planning to hold some daytime business events at the end of July and was wondering what refreshments to serve. The type of event would have lent itself perfectly to alcoholic drinks but she figured that most people during the day would not particularly want to drink alcohol, particularly as they would be driving. Good quality, sophisticated cordials seemed like a good alternative, particularly when diluted with a mixture of both still and sparkling chilled water, adding just a bit of fizz. One bottle of homemade blackcurrant & lemongrass cordial and another of elderflower cordial was a welcome gift.

The Raspberry Harvest

My raspberry harvest is the longest of the soft fruit harvests. It started this year in mid-June with the first of the yellow raspberries and it will probably still be just about hobbling along until October. Right now it is at its peak and the raspberries need picking every two days and will yield 4-8lb pounds each time.

It is funny how as the season progresses my attitude towards the raspberries change. At first there is great excitement and each raspberry is picked with care and we are anxious to pick enough to make a particular recipe - a cheesecake or a trifle or whatever. Then as the raspberries become more abundant I feel more relaxed and I'm happy to bag up some to freeze for jam making later. Then it all becomes a bit of a chore, taking up an hour or so every two days and needing doing again just as often. It suddenly takes on the feeling of a job like the washing - never done! And should I happen to drop one as I'm picking then I no longer bother bending down and scrambling about looking for it. Later in the season when they become rarer again, once again I hunt around, trying to make up the weight I need for a chosen recipe. And then in winter they are missed, although occasionally remembered by thawing some out and making a lovely jelly or something.

I never set out to grow as many raspberries as I do. Initially I bought 12 canes - that was all. Raspberries propagate themselves by sending up sucker plants a few centimeters from the parent. Sucker is a good term, because that is what I am, a sucker. When I see a new plant I can't help but want to keep it. So over the years we have gradually expanded the amount of space occupied by raspberry plants.

I remember last year when I went on holiday for 3 weeks in August my parents popped by weekly to harvest and water as necessary. On my return my mum told me about all the things they had picked and she described all the different ways she had used the raspberries. "Oh," I said, "do you like raspberries?".

"Used to," my dad muttered.

I know the feeling!

With limited freezer space, I spend the summer making raspberries into jam and desserts as quickly as possible. This year with the purchase of an additional secondhand freezer I am hoping I can relax a little and pace out the jam making for the rest of the year. There should always be plenty in stock!

Raspberry Jelly & Trifle

Raspberry Jelly

3 tablespoons cold water
1 tablespoon or 1 sachet powdered gelatin
8 oz (225 g) raspberries
4 oz (110 g) granulated sugar
15 fl oz (425 g) cold water

Put 3 tablespoons of cold water into a small pan and sprinkle over the gelatin, then stir and set aside for 5 minutes. Put the raspberries, sugar and 15 fl oz of water into a large pan and bring to the boil. Leave the fruit to simmer for 2 minutes until soft then press through a sieve to make a puree. Heat the gelatin over a low heat for a minute or two until clear then stir this into the raspberry puree. Pour into suitable containers/moulds and chill for 2-4 hours until set.

Raspberry Trifle

1 pint (600 ml) of raspberry jelly (see recipes above)
1 raspberry swiss roll

Raspberry cordial, apple juice or sherry
1 pack of ready to make custard powder
100ml whipping cream

100ml creme fraiche
A few raspberries

Make raspberry jelly as shown in the recipes above. Cut the swiss roll into slices and press into the bottom of a suitable dish. Pour over enough raspberry cordial/apple juice/sherry to dampen the sponge. Allow the cake to soak up the liquid and become mushy. You could also add a layer of fresh raspberries too at this point if you wish. Pour the jelly over the swiss roll and refrigerate for 2-3 hours until set. In the meantime, make up the custard as instructed on the packet and allow to cool completely at room temperature. Once the jelly has set, pour the custard over the top and level off. Return to the refrigerator for at least another hour. Whip together the cream and creme fraiche until stiff then spoon on top of the custard. Finish with a few fresh raspberries or glace cherries just before serving.

Strawberry Season

In my garden the soft fruit season always seems to start with strawberries. Usually this is in the first week of June but this year it started in May. There is something amazing about the first of any crop but the first strawberries are fantastic. Not that I get to taste many of them as my girls seek them out and gobble them straight off the plant, warmed and extra delicious in the sunshine.

It takes several days of strawberry harvesting before we have enough to take some home and serve them more formally as a dessert - usually just simply with cream. Then gradually, we are able to harvest several pounds at a time and this is when I start building up my stocks for jam making. By this point the sloppiness of girls' harvesting technique becomes apparent, as they continue to seek out the glorious "monster" strawberries. I follow on behind, meticulously picking the small, extra flavoursome ones that they overlooked. These make the best jam anyway.

It is hard to beat freshly picked, properly ripe strawberries and they are dead easy to grow. If you haven't already got strawberries growing in your garden or on your patio or balcony then go and buy a few plants from the nearest garden centre or DIY shop. They will produce a few fruit even in their first year and will continue fruiting and producing new strawberry plants every year after that. They don't take up much space and can be grown in containers as easily as straight in the ground. They need little attention too, although you may wish to net them to protect the fruit from birds and small children!

If you don't want to grow your own then try a bit of pick your own. Mousloe Farm near Newport Pagnell and Warrington House Farm just north of Olney are two places that you can pick your own strawberries in Milton Keynes. There is also Wakefield Farm in Potterspury, just outside Milton Keynes. Picking your own is fun and it can make for a great family activity too.

It is very easy when picking your own or growing your own to get a bit carried away and to end up with more strawberries than you can reasonably eat in any one sitting. They will store in the fridge for a few days but taste better if you allow them to reach room temperature before eating. You can, of course, pop them into the freezer too but when they thaw out they will be mushy so can only be used in jam and baking recipes. Not that that is a problem as there are loads of great recipes for using strawberries. Before putting any in the freezer, my girls love to help me make strawberry and marshmallow ice-cream with fresh strawberries; a good way to preserve the flavour of fresh strawberries to enjoy at your leisure any time.

Strawberry & Marshmallow Ice cream

1½ lb (700 g) strawberries

5 oz (140 g) icing sugar

1½ tsp lemon juice

8 oz (225 g) mini marshmallows

7½ fl oz (210 ml) milk

½ pint (300 ml) double cream

Puree the strawberries so that you are left with a seedless liquid. Add the sugar and lemon juice and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Put half the marshmallows and the milk into a suitable bowl and heat in the microwave for 2 minutes to melt them. Stir this mixture, add the cream and whisk lightly so that it thickens slightly. Combine with the strawberry puree, mixing until the mixture is evenly pink. Add the remaining marshmallows, pour into suitable containers and place in the freezer for 3 hours. Remove from the freezer and beat the ice cream to introduce air, to break any ice crystals and to distribute the marshmallows throughout the ice cream.

As with all British seasons, the strawberry season is short so get out there and get picking whilst they are at their best.

Elderflower season

One of the things I find frustrating when I flick through preserving recipe books is when a recipe requires ingredients that are not available at the same time when growing your own. Blackcurrant and apple may be a classic combination but I do not have apples ready when the blackcurrants are out. I saw a recipe the other day for a jam using rhubarb and apple. Fail! There are about 4 months between these two ingredients (at least in my world!).

Fortunately, with the use of the freezer it is possible for me to freeze some blackcurrants to use when the apples are ready and so you will find Blackcurrant and Apple Jam in the Jammy Cow product list. Another classic and delicious combination which requires the intervention of the freezer is gooseberry and elderflower. These two seem to miss each other by a matter of days, with the elderflowers finishing by the end of May and the gooseberries ripening sometime from the end of May to July. So rather than risking missing that special moment when both are available (although arguably not at their best), I pick the elderflowers now and freeze them until the gooseberries are good an plump.

I don't grow elderflowers myself but they feature frequently in the hedgerows and municipal planting of Milton Keynes. We pass many bushes on the school run each morning in fact. Once you have your eye in you'll spot them all over the place. Although it may not be your eyes that notice them first, as the heavy scent is often so strong that your nose will notice it first.

There are other whitish cream blossom flowers out at the moment so if you do decide to collect elderflowers please make sure you know what you are doing. The result really won't be the same if you collect the wrong flowers and I guess there is a possibility you may poison yourself! Below is a photo of a blossom that isn't elderflower.

Elderflowers grow on shrub or tree sized plants and have an umbrella shaped blossom made up of numerous of tiny cream flowers. The leaves are typical leaf shaped, fairly large and grow in collections of 5 or 7 leaves on one stem. If you think you have found the elderflower then smell it. It should have a lovely strong sweet perfume. If it has no perfume or stinks like sweaty donkeys then forget it! Below is a photo of what you are looking for.

Most recipes call for 20 large flower heads so aim to collect at least this many. They can be snapped off with sharp fingernails or snipped off with scissors. Back home, give them a good shake to remove any bugs. You may also wish to wash them. I always use my elderflowers in recipes as a flavouring so they usually get strained out of the finished product. This means there is no need to fiddle around with snipping each flower from the head. So, either use them fresh or pack them into freezer bags, squash out as much air as possible and seal. Then pop them into the freezer until needed. They will probably discolour and go brown on thawing them out but they will retain their flavour and this is the key thing. They can be used from frozen to flavour jams (recipe to follow when seasonal) as well as to make things such as elderflower cordial.

If you fancy using them straight away then try making some elderflower cordial now. It is dead easy and tastes delicious. As well as diluting it to make a drink you can use it to flavour other things such as butter icing for fairy cakes. You may also like to try the River Cottage recipe for elderflower panna cotta. My 8 year old made this a couple of weekends ago and it was delicious. Whatever you decide, if you want to use elderflowers then get out there and pick some now because they won't be there next week!

Elderflower Cordial

2lb 4 oz (1kg) sugar

1½ pints (900ml) boiling water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon lime juice

about 15 large elder flower heads

1 lemon, sliced

1 lime, sliced

Put the sugar in a non-metallic bowl with the boiling water and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add the lemon and lime juices. Wash and flick dry the elder flower heads then snip off the flowers into the bowl. Add the sliced lemon and lime. Stir then cover the bowl with Clingfilm and leave to stand for 24 hours. Scald a jelly bag and drain the mixture through it into a clean bowl. Funnel into sterile bottles then refrigerate. Dilute to taste with still or fizzy water. Will keep in the refrigerator for about 3 months.

Tomato - fruit or vegetable?

"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in the fruit salad"

I love this quote and it is so true! In my mind, the terms "fruit" and "vegetable" should be used to describe the way the food is eaten rather than the technical botanical definition. If used in sweet dishes then they are fruit, if used in savoury, they are vegetables. Using this rule, rhubarb is a fruit and tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are all vegetables.

That may be wisdom, but that does not change the fact that tomatoes are in fact the fruit of the tomato plant. So the question is, can you make a jam out of tomatoes? Maybe another question ought to be, would you want to? I can't quite imagine reaching for a jar of tomato jam to spread on my breakfast toast! Maybe wisdom would be to use the knowledge that tomatoes are a fruit to make a preserve that sets like a jam but that can be eaten in a savoury way.

I had 6lbs of tomatoes left in my freezer and with the soft fruit about to ripen, it was time I used the tomatoes up to make some space. So here was my chance to try making some tomato jam.

The jam making technique requires the fruit to be cooked gently to extract the natural pectin from the fruit. With the addition of sugar and by bringing the mixture to a vigorous boil for several minutes the pectin reaches its setting point. When it cools down, the jam will set to something that can be spread. This is quite different from the chutney making process, which relies on simmering the mixture for several hours until enough water has evaporated that it becomes thick. In a way, chutney making is easier because with enough patience it will always become thick but on the other hand after hours of reducing you can end up with a lot less than you thought you might! I figured it would be nice to use the natural pectin in the tomatoes to thicken the preserve rather than having to reduce it to almost nothing to get it thick enough.

Using this technique would make the preserve a jam but I wanted to make something savoury so I decided to add some savoury flavours to the mixture such as herbs, chilli, onion, celery and just a dash of balsamic vinegar. As it was just the flavour of the onion and celery rather than the texture that I wanted, I decided to chop these but wrap them in muslin so they could be removed after cooking.

After 10 minutes or so of cooking to thoroughly infuse the savoury flavours, it was time to add the warmed sugar and to continue as if making a jam. After 15 minutes or so of rolling boil the mixture began to show signs that the setting point had been reached but as I suspected it was only a light set, producing something of a sauce consistency rather than something you could balance on the back of your knife. I was pleased with this - a sort of ketchup feel to it but without the tangy vinegar flavours. In fact, I think I had created a sweet tomato and chilli dipping sauce. Hmm... sounds more appetising than tomato jam, I think! So what shall I use as the official name on the labels?

My new quote is:

"Knowledge is knowing you can make jam from tomatoes, wisdom is knowing not to spread it on toast."

Sweet Tomato & Chilli Dipping Sauce (Tomato Jam)

6 lb of tomatoes

750ml passata

1 tablespoon tomato puree

Juice of 1 lemon

About 1 fl oz of balsamic vinegar

1 onion

1 stick of celery

3 teaspoons salt

3 teaspoons of crushed chilli

1 bay leaf

About 3 lb granulated sugar

A bunch of fresh marjoram

A bunch of fresh basil

Puree the tomatoes and pass through a sieve to remove the skin and seeds. Add the passata to the puree and measure it. For every pint of tomato liquid, weigh out 1 pound of sugar. Place the sugar in an oven proof dish and heat in a low oven. Pour the tomato liquid into the preserving pan then add the tomato puree. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and measure then make up to 3 fl oz with balsamic vinegar. Pour this into the tomato liquid. Peel and chop the onions and chop the celery then wrap them in a piece of muslin and place in the pan. Finally, add the salt, chilli and bay leaf to the pan. Bring to the boil then simmer for 10 minutes. Next, remove the muslin and bay leaf and pour in the sugar. Stir well until the sugar has dissolved completely. Bring to the boil and allow it to boil for 15 minutes or so then test for a set. Once set, remove from the heat and add the finely chopped fresh herbs before ladling into warmed jars.