Showing posts with label Apples. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apples. Show all posts

Wednesday, 24 September 2014

Kitchen Gadget 9. Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer

Picture the scene. It's a beautiful autumn day. The sun is shining, the tree's are golden, your apple tree is full to bursting with ripe fruit. You carefully pick as many as you can, but you know that these apples are not keepers. No matter how nicely you pack them they just will not survive being stored for long. Instead you need to process them, eat some now, freeze some for later, maybe make chutneys and other preserves with the rest.

You get the picture? You're standing in your kitchen faced with a mound of apples and they all need dealing with. Every single one. Luckily, someone else has been here first - enter the Apple Peeler Corer Slicer. Simply skewer an apple on the prongs,



turn the handle,



and out comes an apple ready for cooking. Magic.



Apple Crumble
A simple recipe, but one that plays an important part in our repertoire. We use equal quantities of the main ingredients mostly because it makes it simple to remember. 

For the crumble:
120g Plain Flour
120g Porridge Oats
120g Butter
120g Sugar*

plus:
~700g stewed apple, sweetened to taste

*I've not specified type of sugar here as we use a different combination every time. We always start with granulated and then decide to swap out part of it for soft brown or muscavado, or whatever we fancy and have in the cupboard.

1. Pop all the crumble ingredients in a food processor and mix until, well, crumbly. Alternatively rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs and then stir through the sugar and oats.


2. Place the stewed fruit in the bottom of a casserole dish. Top with the crumble mix and even off.


3. Place in the oven at 180C for 25-30 mins, or until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is golden. Serve hot with custard or ice cream or cream or yoghurt...



Once you've tried this once it's a great recipe for experimenting and using up odds and ends. In the crumble photographed here I added a handful of raspberries into the apple, a large teaspoon of ground ginger into the crumble mixture and a sprinkling of demerara across the top for a little added crunch. How will you make yours?
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Wednesday, 12 February 2014

The Great Swift Bake Off

I am sure many of you brits will have picked up on the phenomenon that is "The Great British Bake Off" (bbc link). For those less familiar here's a quick summary: A group of amateur bakers (normaly fairly good ones) compete in rounds of three challenges to avoid elimination by two judges - Mary Berry (cookery guru and the go to cookery book of choice for cakes) and Paul Hollywood (master baker). A colleague and I were discussing this and, partly inspired by a friend who had done something similar, decided we should have an office version.
The office version was not going to entail three challenges per round in a televised kitchen but just a single item of baking. We produced a list of some 25+ challenges we fancied and whittled it down to the following list:

Round 1       Tray Bake
Round 2   24 Biscuits
Round 3   24 Bread Sticks
Round 4   Victoria Sponge
Round 5   12 Sweet Buns
Round 6   1 Family Sized Savory Pie (hot water crust, pork pie or similar)
Round 7  Layered Cake
Round 812 Chocolate Éclairs
Round 924 Petit Fours, 2 types

We have had a surprisingly good take up from a mostly male office. About 25% of the office are competing!

Jen and I would like to throw this open wider: If you fancy the challenge of baking along as the year progresses then post a link to your entry in Mr Linky each month so we can all have a look. This could be a blog / instagram / tweet / flickr / etc - all are welcome!


This month: Tray Bake.
Jen has baked this recipe a few times as a cake but I stole it, tweaked it slightly and did it as a tray bake. The recipe is for a Cider Apple Cake - care of Jennifer and her blog. If you want the recipe do have a look at her site.


The scores are in and I got a close 3rd place (one vote behind joint first). Incentive to work harder for the next one!


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Sunday, 29 September 2013

September in the Chicken Coop

This month in the chicken coop the hens have been....

...enjoying windfall apples by the beak-full. They love anything sweet and have been delighted this month to find such large quantities of treats just landing at their feet. I'm not sure how many apples they got through, but it certainly inspired us to go and pick all the ripe fruit every few days!


...moulting. I know I said Fizzy was last month, but she's made a pretty poor show of it compared to Pepper who has been looking decidedly scruffy for the last few weeks.

Refusing to pose for photos!
...dodging the neighbourhood pets. We were eating breakfast in the conservatory last week and there was a sudden kerfuffle outside. Often this is just a case of someone reasserting the pecking order, but to our horror we saw our hens scattering in all directions as a cat made an attempt to grab one. The hens were far too quick, and Joe soon saw off the cat, but this is the first time we've seen a cat brave enough to do this - normally they steer well clear of them as our larger hens can be quite assertive.

Until now our garden has seemed remarkably predator free, leaving us with a rather blasé approach to our hens security, but time has come to reassess. They won't like it, but I think we'll be going back to only giving them freedom of the garden while we're at home to keep an eye on things. We'll just have to put up with their indignant clucks!

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