Pizza for dessert?

It's my youngest daughter's birthday on 9th July and this year we are doing a little lunchtime party with a pizza theme. The plan is to invite over a couple of her friends and for me to help them create their own pizzas for the birthday tea.

I confess that I secretly love planning parties - as long as they are on a small manageable scale. The main thing I love is the challenge of a theme. So what could I think of for a pizza theme? Well, this week I have enjoyed finding 4 melamine plates shaped and decorated like pieces of pizza, and gummy sweets in the shape of piece slices and neatly packed in their own mini pizza boxes. I even managed to find make your own pizza kits which I thought would make nice party bag gifts for the girls to take home. There was a slight flaw with these, however, as when they arrived the instructions were written in Italian! Fortunately, my friend who now lives in Italy was able to translate them for me. I did at one point ponder pizza bunting as I realised bunting flags were the same shape as pizza slices (getting obsessed by now??). Sadly I couldn't find any for sale on the internet (a hole in the market, if you ask me!) so I have persuaded the girls to create some out of paper.

So in my perfect pizza party what should be for dessert? Pizza of course!

There I was standing in the supermarket contemplating custard and ice-cream cones when I spotted a box of mini flan cases and suddenly I saw them in a whole new light - sweet pizza bases. The complete concept fell into my brain and later that afternoon the girls and I tested out dessert pizza. 

Onto the flan case we spread some strawberry jam as the "tomato sauce".

This was followed by a couple of spoonfuls of custard for the "cheese". And then, as with pizza, we chose our toppings - pieces of fruit and some mini marshmallows on this occasion. It was a lovely, simple activity to do with the girls and it made a great afternoon snack and will definitely feature as dessert at the pizza party. 

How to get strawberry jam to set

It is June. It is strawberry season. It is time to make strawberry jam.

It is funny how popular strawberry jam is. It seems that we were all brought up eating strawberry jam and it is the one that is most likely to be in our cupboards and the one offered with a scone for cream tea. It is of no surprise to me that by the time strawberries are ready again in June I have back ordered for strawberry jam and I know however many strawberries I harvest I will sell out before next June.

For many people strawberry jam is the first jam that they have a go at making - maybe at the request of their family or after an over-enthusiastic trip to a pick-your-own farm. However, this is perhaps a little unfortunate as it is probably the trickiest jam to make. It all comes down to strawberries being a low pectin fruit. Pectin is the "magic ingredient" in fruit that causes a jam to reach a setting point. Some fruit, such as strawberries, some cherry varieties and pears are low in pectin, whilst other, such as blackcurrants, gooseberries and apples are high in pectin. The higher the pectin the easier it is to get a successful set. My advice, if you fancy having a go at making jam wait until July and try blackcurrant jam.

Should you decide to make strawberry jam then here are my tips for attaining a successful set.

1) Use some unripe fruit: The riper fruit gets, the lower the pectin levels in it. At the same time, the riper the fruit gets, the better the flavour becomes. When making a jam try to use a mixture of nice ripe fruit and some slightly underripe fruit for both flavour and set.

2) Add a lemon: Most strawberry jam recipes recommend the use of lemon juice, added at the same time as the sugar. The idea behind this is that the acidity in the lemon helps to extract the pectin in the fruit. My experience has shown that if the lemon juice is added right at the beginning of the whole process it is easier to   reach a good set. Make sure it is freshly squeezed lemon juice.

3) Add pectin: All commerically produced jam and a lot of homemade jam use added pectin to help to reach a good set. Even River Cottage's Pam the Jam does this. One argument for doing this is that it is likely to reach the setting point sooner than it would without the added pectin and if a jam is boiled for too long it darkens and losing some of the fruitiness in the flavour. Pectin can be added in a variety of ways. Jam sugar has pectin added to it and is used as a direct replacement for granulated sugar. Liquid pectin can be bought in bottles and added as instructed. It is also possible to make your own pectin stock by boiling up apple cores, pips and peel. I do this when I'm making a batch of something with apples such as jam, chutney or crumble. Once it has been boiling for an hour or so, strain the liquid out and test a small sample of it with a few drops of methylated spirits. If you have a good pectin stock a small springy ball should form in the liquid. Note methylated spirits is poisonous so dispose of this test sample carefully. The stock can then be frozen in ice cube trays and the ice cubes of pectin can be dropped into your jam as needed when the sugar is added. I use apple pectin stock for getting pear jam to set but have never actually found it necessary to add pectin to strawberry jam.

4) Combine the strawberries with a high pectin fruit: Life is a lot easier if rather than trying to make pure strawberry jam, the strawberries are combined with a high pectin fruit such as gooseberries. Strawberry and gooseberry jam is very easy to set yet the dominant flavour is strawberry.

5) Be patient and check for set thoroughly: Strawberry jam will set eventually if boiled for long enough so be patient. I would also recommend stirring it occasionally to check that it isn't overcooking at the bottom and beginning to burn because that will ruin the whole batch and you will cry! Although jam is supposed to set at 104°C, don't totally rely on a thermometer to be sure it has set - instead put a little on a cold saucer and push it with your finger. If it wrinkling the jam is set. If it doesn't then boil it for longer.

If you get to the stage where you have bottled your jam and it is still runny, do not despair, the whole lot can be emptied back into your preserving pan and boiled up again until the setting boil is reached. This is not ideal as it is more time consuming and you have to wash the jars up before they can be refilled but it will not damage the jam so is useful to know. Failing that, just use your jam differently. Rather than trying to balance it on your toast, use it as a flavouring in yoghurt or ice-cream, use it has a sauce with cheesecake or mix it with milk and call it milkshake!

A Jammy Cow in Normandy

We took the girls on their first foreign holiday this weekend, with a Friday to Monday visit to Normandy, France. I spent 3 weeks of every summer holiday from the year I was born until I was 15 on the continent in a tent visiting beaches and famous landmarks but it had been 22 years since I last went to France.

When people go on a foreign holiday they adopt one of two attitudes towards food. Some like to seek out familiar foods and try to eat as close to home-cuisine as possible. Others embrace the opportunity to try something new and lap up the culture by eating the native food. I am very much in the second of these groups and really wanted to enjoy something a bit different. With 22 years of holidaying in the UK, it has been very hard to experience anything out of the ordinary when it comes to food. No matter where you go in the UK you can always find a Tesco supermarket and a McDonalds. You can, of course, find the odd local items if you try - some local jam maybe or some freshly landed seafood - but on the whole we have turned our entire country into an homogeneous market. Even some of things that are marketed as local souvenirs are made in a factory and distributed nationally or, worse still, are imported but just have local packaging. Sigh.

It was therefore refreshing to enter a different country with a completely different attitude towards food and shopping. Normandy in particular is proud of its cows and associated dairy-products and we were in the Calvados area around Caen. Now, I remember from when I was kid that there are huge hypermarkets in France. They used to be Mammoth when I was child and sold so much more than just food at a time when supermarkets in this country were in town, small and just sold food and household essentials. But this time we managed to travel hundreds of miles and only saw two large supermarkets. Instead, the food shopping we did was in the high street.

In a time when the British high street seems on the verge of collapse, the French high street is still very much alive. I laughed when I realised that my school French lessons about the bolongerie, boucherie, passterie etc. was actually what it is like in France. You really can walk down any French high street and shop in all these little shops, one next to the other. That is, unless you happen to be in the high street at lunchtime when all the shops will be shut. Yes, shut for lunch! And forget shopping on Sundays - shut again. Oddly, the small convenience stores open from 7am until 9am only on a Sunday - presumably so you can buy your baguettes and pain au chocolat for breakfast. And then the bolongeries open again late Sunday evening for a couple of hours so people can stock up again on bakery products - presumably to enjoy some cheese and/or pate with slices of baguette with their wine after dinner. Yes, the whole shopping culture in France seems to revolve around food. Good for them, I say!

On our trip we popped into a local market and some of these classic little shops and dredged up our school French, added a smattering of hand gestures and a bit of Fronglaise and successfully bought local food with very little trouble. Normandy strawberries, Normandy cheese, Normandy butter, French jam, Houlgate pate, Port Salut cheese, Calvados cider and freshly baked baguette and croissants. It was a delight to enjoy these local foods but quite honestly, it would have been positively difficult to buy anything that wasn't at least French, if not made within Normandy. For this I think the French should be admired.

So this morning, having arrived back from France late last night, my girls ate French croissants with Jammy Cow jam for breakfast and Steve went to work with a French rosette (salami) and Jammy Cow chutney sandwich. Hmmm... an odd mix of "local" foods but perhaps appropriate in this day an age when it is possible to travel hundreds of miles in a few hours.

Diamond Jubilee Celebrations

So the special long weekend of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is finally here. I hope everyone is looking forward to it. You don't have to be patriotic to enjoy a 4 day weekend but it is an excellent time to celebrate. I think it is important for nations to have a sense of pride and it is a good opportunity to be proud of being British, whatever that may mean to you.

Today I took my picnic blanket down to my daughters' school at lunchtime to join them for a Jubilee Picnic. It was a very simple idea but it worked very well and was well attended by parents. All the children were dressed up in red, white and blue and they had made bunting and paper crowns. Lovely.  Tomorrow I think we shall be having a barbecue, followed by the classic British dessert - a trifle.

After that I'm not sure what we will do so I've been reading the local paper to see what's on in Milton Keynes over the weekend. There are various events including Big Lunches, the Bletchley carnival, fun run in Stony Stratford and garden parties. No excuse for sitting around twiddling our thumbs!

The event that caught my eye was the Parks Trust Garden Party on Tuesday which amongst other things includes old fashioned competitions such as the biggest vegetable and flower arranging. But more up my street is the best batch of scones and best Victoria sandwich cake competition. Now there's a challenge. Of course, should you decide to enter these I would strongly advise a stop by my house first to pick up a jar of Jammy Cow Raspberry Jam. A seedless, fruity jam like that is bound to make your baked goods a winner! Good luck!


Victoria Sandwich Cake

225g (8oz) butter
225g (8oz) caster sugar
4 medium eggs
225g (8oz) self-raising flour
110g (4oz) butter
225g (8oz) icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
110g (4oz) raspberry jam

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas 4 and grease and line sandwich tins. Place the butter into a large bowl and if it is straight out of the fridge heat it in the microwave for 30 seconds. Add the sugar and cream together. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring in between additions. Sift in the flour and stir well to combine. Spoon equally into the two sandwich tins then bake for 25 minutes until springy to the touch. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out to cool completely on a wire rack. In the meantime, mix together the butter, icing sugar and vanilla to make the butter icing. Once the cakes are cool, spread one half with the butter icing and one half with the jam then sandwich the two fillings together.

Shelf Life

The shelf life of a batch of jam or chutney is generally about 2 years before opening. After this time the contents of the jar are not likely to give you food poisoning but they will be "past their best". That's to say, the colour, flavour and/or texture of the preserve will not be as it should be. You could if you wanted still use it up, although probably best in cooking rather than on your toast or on the side of your plate.

Of course, the very point of jams and chutneys is to preserve the ingredients so it hardly surprising they have such long shelf-lives. They are after all, full of sugar and vinegar in the case of chutney, both of which are natural preservatives. They are also cooked at a high temperature and bottled whilst still hot into sterilised jars. The lids too can be steriled in the oven or sterilised by turning the jam/chutney upsidedown to rest on the lid whilst still boiling hot.

Some people comment to me that they sometimes find that their jam goes mouldy after opening. This shouldn't really happen but it does sometimes. There are always mould spores in the air and these can get into the jars whilst the lids are off or from the knives and spoons poked into it. One of the worst things to do is to push your knife into the jam after you have spread butter or margarine on your bread as the breadcrumbs and butter are a lovely starting point for mould. Generally however, jam should be fine to store at room temperature after opening but eat it up within a  few weeks of opening. Jammy Cow jams are perfect for this because they come in small jars.

At this time of year I like to make Elderflower Cordial but in the past I have been limited to the number of bottles I could fit in my fridge as they tend to go mouldy in the bottle at room temperature. The problem with Elderflower cordial is that it is left out (covered of course) for a day or so for the flavours to infuse and it is bottled cold. Not deterred, I did a bit of research and found out how to pasteurise it so that it could be stored at room temperature until the bottle is opened. This turned out not to be too tricky so now I can make lots more bottles and offer them to the public for sale.

The cordial is poured into sterilised bottles to within about a centimetre of the top. The bottles without lids on are stood in the preserving pan and packed out with empty jam jars so that they are held tight and are not at risk of falling over. It then takes 3 kettle fulls of boiling water to fill the preserving pan. This is then heated on a fairly gentle heat until the cordial temperature reaches 70°C. The heat is reduced and the temperature is maintained for 20 minutes, in which time the cordial expands in the bottle to fill it completely. After that the tamper-proof lids are applied and secured and then the bottle inverted to sterilise the lids. The cordial remains sterile then until opened, after which it needs to be refrigerated and used up within about a month.

I'm pleased to have cracked this technique and increased the shelf-life of this lovely product and I think I shall be experimenting more during the summer to pasteurise our other family favourites such as Blackcurrant & Lemongrass cordial and raspberry and strawberry syrups which are great for flavouring milkshakes, yoghurts and pouring on ice-cream sundaes.

Spring clean your food cupboard

May is an obvious time to spring clean. Maybe it has something to do with the bright sunshine coming in through the windows, highlighting the layer of dust or maybe it is something more primeval - similar to whatever it is that drives the birds to build nests. Whatever the reason, I always feel like having a good sort out at this time of year and I make the most of that feeling because it doesn't last long! In the kitchen it is the perfect time to sort out your food stores. The old season is over now and the new harvest is just about to begin. By next month there will be the first glut of the year and it will be handy to have somewhere to put it.

I'm in a fortunate position of having two freezers - one just for fruit and vegetables for my preserves and one for family food. At this time of year the fruit and veg freezer is very nearly empty so it is the perfect time to defrost it, temporarily moving the remaining fruit into the family freezer. Once that is done, I move everything from the family freezer into the fruit freezer, defrost that and return it. However, this time not everything makes it back into the freezer because it has been in storage for just too long and needs throwing away. I hate food waste but sometimes it is necessary. It is weird when this job is done to be in the unusual position of knowing the entire contents of my freezer. However, I take advantage of this and write down a meal plan for the next week or so, using up things in the freezer that need to be eaten soon.

The next job is the fridge. I admit that I clean the fridge about once a month so I never get too ghastly a surprise but I usually stumble across something like the soggy end of a piece of cucumber or similar that I have missed in the meantime. It is important to keep your fridge clean and I think in many kitchens it probably contains the least wiped down surfaces in the place. When I tackle the fridge cleaning I start at the top and work my way down, placing the contents of each shelf in turn on the worktop, removing the shelf, cleaning it, drying it and returning it before replacing all the food that is still edible.

Finally the food cupboard. I tackle this probably twice a year, again working from shelf to shelf, top to bottom. Out of date food is thrown away, the shelves are wiped down and things are returned in a lovely ordered arrangement. Oh how I wish my cupboard always looked like this. It is worth reviewing your herbs and spices at least once a year because they do lose their flavour with time. Although they won't go mouldy and need throwing away they may be so old that they are not worth using anymore. On the note of herbs, now is a good time to buy some growing herbs from the supermarket to put on your window sill. They should do very nicely there for a few weeks or even longer if you pot them on or plant them out come June and are nicer than dried herbs.

When deciding what food to throw away and what to keep, bear in mind that if it is past its "use by" date it could potentially cause food poisoning. However, a best before day just means it was probably better before that date. It is "stale" rather than "off" and you can use your own judgement as to whether it should be thrown away or if you can still use it up. If you are throwing food away, think about the container it is in and whether it can be re-used. Certainly, if it came in a glass jar then wash it out, stick in a cupboard and refill it with homemade preserves in a month or so.

Here's one of my favourite recipe for using up stale food cupboard ingredients. For this use stale biscuits and the remaining bag of mixed dried fruit left over from mince pie or Christmas cake making in December. Then when you are all done with the spring cleaning, make yourself a cup of tea, put your feet up and reward yourself with a slice of tiffin!

Tiffin

8 oz (225g) stale biscuits
4 oz (110g) butter
1 good tablespoon golden syrup
8 oz (225g) mixed dried fruit
2 oz (55g) glacé cherries, chopped
7 oz (200g) milk chocolate

Place the biscuits in a bag and bash with a rolling pin until crumbed. Melt together the butter and syrup in a pan over a low heat. Combine the biscuit, butter mix and fruit and stir well. Grease a suitable tin and press the mixture into it and level. Refrigerate for at least half an hour until solid. Melt the chocolate over a pan of hot water then spread over the biscuit base, level out and return to the fridge. Once solid, cut the tiffin into small squares and transfer to an airtight container. Keeps well.

Easy Peasy Jammy Biscuits

Thumbing my way through a back issue of Good Food magazine from March 2006 that I'd obtained via Freecyle, I came across a recipe for some simple looking jam biscuits. Having made a fresh batch of raspberry jam yesterday I decided to give the biscuits a go today. Goodness me they were easy and made a batch of biscuits as pretty as a posy of poppies. Took me about 10 minutes to whip them up and 15 minutes to cook. Mind you, they were even quicker to eat!

Easy Jammy Biscuits (makes 12)

4oz (110g) butter
8oz (225g) self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
4oz (110g) caster sugar
A little milk
Jam (flavour of your choosing)

Preheat the oven to 190°C (gas 5) and grease a large baking tray. Chop the butter and place in a bowl. Sift in the flour and salt then rub the fat into the flour until it has the consistency of breadcrumbs. Stir in the caster sugar. Splash in a little milk until it is moist enough to bind into a dough. Use hands to roll the dough into a large sausage shape about 5cm in diameter. Cut the sausage into slices about 2cm thick and put the slices well spaced out onto the baking tray. Use the end of a wooden spoon to make an indentation in the centre of each biscuit. Spoon about half a teaspoon full of jam into each indentation (don't worry if it overflows the hole). Bake the biscuits for 15 minutes until golden then cool on a rack.