If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
Ginger is, along with garlic, the base ingredient of South asian cooking just as olive oil and tomatoes might be said to be the base of say Mediterranean cuisine. It nearly doesn’t qualify for this year’s theme, but you can eat ginger in it’s own right – albeit candied or crystalised. As an ingredient it comes in many forms fresh (for that savory cooking base), dried and ground (think – sprinkled on melon), pureed for the lazy, and the aforementioned sweet stuff can be used in all sorts of desserts – Rhubarb and Ginger Crumble (or jam). Ginger is so ubiquitously available around the world, that if global supply lines are forced to prioritise, I sincerely hope that Ginger will be a top priority.
The other part of this post is about Growing You Own – be it a garden or an allotment, in the WAR that we all find ourselves in, with food prices rising, we can remember the British World War 2 exhortation to Dig for Victory – or at least, dig to save your bank balance!
Unfortunately, unless you live in the tropics, you cannot grow ginger outside, all year around but this site tells you how to manage it between indoor and outdoors… Back in 1968 when I was 14, we visited Australia and in the holiday between the two terms we were there, we did a 4000 mile round-trip by car, and we visited what claimed to be the largest ginger plantation in the southern hemisphere at Bundaberg. Decades later, courtesy of globalisation, I can buy Bundaberg Ginger Beer here in England! I once talked to a sales rep. for Stones Ginger Wine about the difficulty of extending this warming drink beyond it’s traditional Christmas slot when it is often consumed in the form of a WhiskyMac. I mentioned the Australian connection but he said that they had to be careful of that because ginger wine is sold in six-packs of “tinnies” in Australia and often represents young Australians first experience of drinking. (Confirmation please from any Australians reading this?) I believe in California, the same slot is filled by Thunderbird Wine (made from pears?).
My partner and I have had an allotment for some three years now and have brought it back from a weed-strewn wasteland to a productive neatness and pride forces me to show it you!
New raised beds completed last year!
Recipe wise I have one tip today – when making jam with rhubarb – a favourite from our allotment – try and pick early, thin stalks – they are tender and less acid. Now, instead of chopping and boiling the fruit before you add the sugar, as you do for most fruit, chopt the stalks into 1/4 inch lengths, weigh and put into a bowl. Add an equal weight of sugar poured over the fruit but not mixed and cover overnight. the next day you will find the sugar will have pulled a lot of juice out of the fruit, leaving it tougher when you gently bring the jam to the boil – in other words it doesn’t all go to a mush, as rhubarg is prone to. And do try it with ginger added – to your own taste of course…
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
Photo by Johen Redman on Unsplash
Eating fish and vegetables only, is known as being Pescatarian and it is a good option if you want, or in these economically distressed times, need to reduce your intake of red and white meat. On environmental and ethical grounds, eating fish is not without its problems – overfishing, the inequity of huge trawlers sucking up the fish on which third world countries depend, and the problems of by-catch – so you need to do due diligence if these things concern you – as they should, just as much as issues around meat production should, or the clearing of land for soya or palm oil. The links are there if you want to look into these issues, and the last one, https://www.wwf.org.uk/10-myths-about-deforestation , illustrates how complicated the global issues around food are – even for vegetarians. however, this post is not about that, it’s about using fish as an ingredient and using freezers as a means of preserving food.
Just as with the post on Chorizo, I like to keep prawns in the freezer as an easy way to add protein and flavour to mainly vegetable dishes, usually stir-fried (which can preserve the goodness and flavour of the vegetables well – more of that in a later post). Also in my freezer, because it is a seasonal vegetable, ideal for the freezing process, are frozen peas. Defrost frozen peas and eat them raw, and you will very nearly capture the straight from the pod sweetness of this lovely little vegetable. When I briefly had a restaurant, my wholesaler stocked large bags of frozen Butter Beans that were a revelation! Previously, since childhood, I was familiar with canned butter beans, which were okay, and then I progressed to soaking and cooking dried butter beans. As one of the largest beans, dried butter beans are difficult to cook without losing the skins and turning to mush – so I can’t stress enough how great butter beans frozen from fresh are. I suppose there are places where butter beans are grown and available fresh, but frozen is the next best thing. Canning is an older process, and once perfected in the 19th century, it revolutionised the storage of food. It is still more energy efficient than freezing, in part because, once frozen, you have to keep the food frozen, and whilst canned food is tasty, freezing probably has the edge on taste. As a child, many was the hour we spent assisting my parents to process trays of peaches brought from the market at peak season and bottled in Kilner Jars – the home equivalent and precursor of canning. Ah! The satisfaction of a larder with shelves packed with those colourful jars and the anticipation of meals to come – but my parents moved with the times, and kilner jars were replaced, for the most part, with a chest freezer.
Kilner Jars
Kilner Jars have made a comeback in recent years, and if energy conservation is your thing, and you have a good size larder, then give them a go as an alternative to the freezer for home preserving and take advantage of seasonal gluts…
Going back to fish as an ingredient, there are a huge range of fish sauces, powdered fish and fish pastes – mainly from South-East Asia – that you can add to dishes to enrich the flavour – and mostly, these ingredients pack a flavour punch that can knock your socks off! But lest you think that those are exclusively Asian, the Romans also made a fish sauce called Garum.
Back in the days of my restaurant, the last dish I prepared before service, was often a fish pie, because much of the cooking was done in a large wok and once topped with mashed potato, it just needed a relatively short time in the oven to brown the potato and for the fish base flavours to mingle.
Frewin’s Fish Pie 1. Obtain a fish pie mix from your fishmonger, it will likely contain cod, smoked haddock, and salmon, or you could purchase these separately and create your own mix. 2. Boil potatoes sufficient to make a topping for the fish pie – unless you are doing fine dining, I like to leave the skins on for the goodness therein. While the potatoes cook – in a large wok or saucepan, fry celery chopped into half-inch pieces – celery is tough and has a lot of water, unlike onions which burn easily, so add the onions second and stir occasionally till the onions are starting to go translucent. 3. Add very thinly sliced carrots or pre-cooked carrots. 4. Add some butter before adding the fish mix. This butter will help the fish not too stick but will also form the basis of the sauce. Cook, stirring well until the fish loses its translucency. 5. Add some wholegrain mustard to taste plus either fresh or dried dill leaf – this is a classic combination of flavours with fish, especially in Scandinavia. You can add frozen peas at this stage too if you want. 6. Add a little plain flour and stir until it soaks up the butter and then quickly add and stir well, a little milk until it combines with the butter/flour to form a roux. Lower the heat right down and stir in cream and season to taste – transfer the mixture to a casserole dish large enough to have room for the mashed potato topping. Carefully add the mashed potato trying to seal the whole surface over the fish base and score with a fork. Dot butter over the scored surface and/or grated cheese if you fancy it more luxurious and bake in a moderately hot oven until the potato topping is nicely brown. You can eat straight away or leave to rest or cool and refrigerate for reheating the next day and of course, you can put some portions in the freezer for another day!
Apologies for the lack of quantities, but this is a dish in which you may vary the ingredients according to taste and what is available – for example, you can make a smaller amount of fish go further by adding mushrooms, you can add a little acid note with chopped gherkins or capers – I never wrote my recipe down before – so take it as guidance only – Bon appetit!
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
This Is the Trick to Making Perfect Sunny-Side-Up Eggs
Eggs certainly qualify for this year’s theme, in addition to the many ways you can eat them in their own right – boiled, fried, poached, and scrambled (did I miss any methods?) – they are a vital ingredient in many other dishes – especially baked goods – cakes and enriched breads like brioche and we have already covered Bread and Butter Pudding! Vital – but not irreplaceable – there is an alternative! Eggs are a substantial source of protein for many Vegetarians, but if you take the next step and go Vegan, then eggs are a no-no. The alternative substance that can substitute, at least for egg-whites, is called Aquafaba, although Aquafava would be a better name since it is bean derived (fava). Aquafaba is the viscous water produced by cooking many kinds of beans but best made by cooking Chickpeas – yes, all that water you tip away if you use tinned chickpeas, can be used to make, say, Meringue! The discovery of this miraculous liquid was as recent as 2014 – a decade that saw a massive rise in sales of Hummus – one of the most famous dishes to be produced from chickpeas – no better time to discover such a valuable byproduct.
This is not an analogue imitation such as I decried in Analogues of Meat because you certainly can’t make a fried egg analogue from Aquafaba, but you can make a substitution of the functional values of egg white as an ingredient, plus you are adding protein that would otherwise be wasted – and if you are Vegan, every bit of protein counts…
In the week of writing this post (one week before A2Z launches!) – there was an episode of the BBC Food Programme on the subject of Beans which is well worth listening to if you are allowed to by the BBC location police…
Short and sweet today! The internet is full of recipes using Aquafaba and I am certainly not going to attempt to insult the intelligence of my esteemed readers by teaching them to cook eggs! I will just say, that if you are lucky enough to have a large garden, you might consider keeping a few chickens and gathering your own eggs…
Equipment for Vegetarian Cooking…
Do you need to re-equip your kitchen with all sorts of new gadgets in order to embrace a reduced meat diet? Short answer – no! Yes, there are some things that tend to be found more in vegetarian circles, such as bean-sprouters, but even as a carnivore, you may have embraced a sprout salad alongside your steak, and if not, then before you rush out and buy a fancy, purpose-made sprouter, experiment with a large jar on its side – just until you are sure you enjoy the routine of sprouting and of course – the product. Nor do you need to get rid of your barbeque, because vegetables have been finding their way onto BQs in increasing numbers, and even high-end cheffy kitchens often include a BQ to get that caramelisation and smoky infused taste for meat and veg!
Bean Sprouts and a sprouter from https://www.liveeatlearn.com/how-to-sprout-legumes/
Steamers are also associated with vegetables and they are great for doing multiple vegetables, but I find that most useful when cooking the logistical nightmare that is Christmas Dinner (the non-vegetarian kind), whilst most of my vegetarian dishes, the vegetables are all mixed together – think Ratatouille or Stir-fry. I will be covering several items of cooking equipment – we have already looked at the Dehydrator and old favourites like the Pressure Cooker will feature, as well as bones of contention such as the Microwave. If I get around to my long thought about book “The Gradual Vegetarian” – you can be sure I will only introduce special purchases of equipment well spaced out and only when a workaround cannot be found, but for now, this blog challenge is arranged alphabetically so let the equipment come as it may…
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of foods which can be eaten on their own but can also become ingredients in other dishes…
Globalisation has been rolled back since the banking crisis of 2008, first by the banking regulation that followed, then by Trumpian and Brexit nationalism and mercantilism, then by Covid and now by the shock of war. – From The Spectator
What does this mean? In short, we have all got used to supply chains that bring things from all over the world in a complicated, interlinked, interdependent, just-in-time web of trade. For most consumers, this is most apparent in food. When I was little, we enjoyed English seasonal apples because the rest of the time, the options were small, but now we eat apples from New Zealand (the antipodes of the UK) and many other countries – evening out the shortages of seasonality. In other areas, a factory in Ukraine, that produces a major share of the world’s Neon requirements, has closed down due to the WAR. You may wonder why I keep using shouty capitals for WAR, well it’s because Putin keeps trying to fool (mostly his own people) by denying the reality of what he is doing and calling it a “Special Military Operation”. The unintended consequence of his ill-thought-out WAR, is an acceleration of the death of globalisation. The Neon factory, exists not for the creation of colourful neon signs (whose days is done, in the age of LEDs) but instead, is used in the production of microchips. There is already a shortage of microchips (used in almost every industrial product these days) due to the disruption of production and supply chains by Covid 19. The fragility of these supply chains was further evidenced by one ship getting stuck and blocking the Suez Canal for a couple of weeks and forcing other ships to take the long way around Africa.
We may hope that countries around the world do not return to mercantilism (the opposite of Globalism) but in the light of the WAR in Ukraine, countries will have to consider more self-reliant trading, less dependence on Russian oil and gas for example, more reliable independent defence strategies and more home-grown food strategies. Today’s Food as an Ingredient is the Date, a fruit that is grown from Spain and North Africa, across to the Far East. Are we to face a shortage of Dates in the future? I hope not, and I can’t see a reason why this particular commodity should be affected by a general retrenchment of globalism – let’s hope not anyway, because dates have an important role as an ingredient in Vegetarian and Vegan cooking – which is one response to the coming crisis in food supply chains.
Dates – as an Ingredient…
Dates – little joyous bundles of nutrition…
It is said of Dates, that if you had to survive on one single foodstuff, you could not do better than Dates. They are 75% carbohydrate and have 2% protein and even 1%fat. They are also tasty – especially when freshly dried, having an unctuous, melt in the mouth softness. My first encounter with dates was good, but not as good as the joy of the whole, fresh fruit. My mother used to buy blocks of chopped compressed dates, which she experimentally, (probably a suggestion from Woman’s Weekly) combined with grated apple as sandwich filling! Best eaten quickly before the apple browned… a better experience were the long boxes of dates with rounded ends that we always had at Christmas, slightly dried but glossily sticky. Today, I live near Bradford, which, having a large Moslem population, can be relied upon to supply dates all year round, but with a huge selection of different varieties at either Ramadan or when the date harvest takes place.
From a vegetarian/environmental point of view – getting your sugars from a natural source, as opposed to eating processed sugars, is a great option – true, both have to be transported from afar, but then there is the environmental cost of processing sugar… So considering dates as an ingredient – they add both sweetness and flavour. For example, I love the combination of rhubarb and dates and might not add any sugar at all providing I add enough dates. In my post on apples, the Fresh Apple Oat Cake was topped with a layer of softened dates and think of classic recipe combinations such as Date and Walnut Cake! Indeed you can happily add chopped dates to any recipe calling for mixed fruit – you can add them to salads and savoury dishes where they add a richer sweetness balance than a pinch of sugar. There are, these days, many refined products made from dates – Date Molasses, Date Sugar, Date Spread and read through the ingredients of many chutneys and sauces and you will find dates. HP Brown Sauce (the original brown sauce) was developed in England to sate the taste of British soldiers, returned from India, who had developed a taste for something rich and spicy and the ingredients include date fo sweetness, and tamarind – almost the opposite of dates, for sourness – another unexpected product of British Imperialism…
Dehydrators
Lastly, I want to turn to an aspect of the post-globalism world that might be coming down the line – preserving food. I will cover several forms of preserving that might help us extend the life of our local food products if globally sourced foods are diminished. We have already touched on jam – a form of preserving, and today I want to touch on Dehydrators. Dried fruit, touted as the responsible parent’s alternative to sweets, is expensive – home dehydrated fruit is cheap! I bought a typical dehydrator with six shelves and can load it simultaneously with a pineapple, apples, kiwi fruit and bananas – roughly a carrier-bag full, and reduce it overnight to a few takeaway tubs full of delicious dried fruit! this is the first and most obvious use of a dehydrator, but you can make your own jerky at the meat eater’s end of the scale, and vegan no-bake bread, at the other end of the spectrum – and guess what? The vegan bread can contain Dates – who would have thought it! My Dehydrator cost me £25.00 and has easily paid for itself providing healthy dried fruit snacks to adult grandchildren as well as ourselves.
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten on their own as well as becoming ingredients in other dishes…
I wrote this post in preparation for April, just about at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the knock-on effects of the WAR, have become more apparent and include the idea that meat production is going to skyrocket. I decided to broaden the scope of my theme to include moving toward more vegetarian or plant-based food in our diet which is not the same thing as full-on espousing Vegetarianism for reasons, Ethical, Environmental, or Health, but rather, an inevitable reaction to meat shortages and rising prices. So, if we must go with the vegetarian favouring times, let us go willingly, or at least without complaint, for there are those without any choice, and let us garner knowledge to make the best of the experience – and what better place to start than using tiny amounts of highly concentrated meat flavour to add to mostly plant based dishes…
This post gets to the heart of using food as an ingredient as opposed to food in it’s own right. I always keep some Chorizo (pronounced Chor – ee -tho ) in my fridge but I almost never eat it by the slice or chunk! I am not vegetarian, but I recognise the need to drastically cut down on the amount of meat produced in the world – for the sake of the environment. Meat has a richness of flavour compared to say, a lentil, especially when, as in the case of Chorizo and similarly cured sausages, it has been concentrated by the process of curing. So a good way of introducing flavour into, mainly vegetable-based dishes, whilst reducing your meat intake (a healthy idea anyway), is to add small quantities of finely chopped Chorizo to your dish. Health-wise, you are also getting some vitamin B which is missing from purely plant-based food.
There is a heath argument against cured meats on account of substances used in the curing process being carcinogenic, but we are talking about small quantities of chorizo and there are so many worse sources of danger all around us, so I am prepared to take the risk for the sake of taste. You can use other types of cured sausage, but I like the fruity, spicy flavour of Chorizo which comes from smoked pimento, and I fry it in with onions at the start of making a dish. It’s a win for flavour, for the environment, and for your personal reduction of meat intake!
The recipe above is from a site showing 41 recipes that include Chorizo as an ingredient, to a greater or lesser extent and illustrates how to incorporate it…
If you have a favourite cured meat that you use as an ingredient – please share in the comments!
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten on their own as well as becoming ingredients in other dishes…
Analogues of Meat – One Route into Vegetarian Eating
The first time I knowingly met vegetarians, was when my family visited my cousin’s family in Walthamstow, London. My Uncle John was brought up vegetarian and now he was doing the same with his family. There were a lot of dishes we were familiar with from my mother’s cooking, Cauliflower Cheese and, Macaroni Cheese, but then there were Vegetarian Sausages. Since this was back in the 60’s, early 70’s, I am not sure what the vegetarian protein was in those days, but they weren’t great, tastewise. They were sausage-shaped though they obviously didn’t have traditional sausage skins (since they are made from sections of intestines ) so they were straight with a synthetic skin, didn’t brown right well, and seemed to have all the rusk but none of the flavour – a fact that lashings of vegetarian gravy (though having more umami than the sausages) – did nothing to improve. This was the Analogue approach to trying to promote the vegetarian lifestyle – make something that imitates a meat product – sad to say – nobody was fooled! The same approach is still being used with vegetarian burgers and even Cauliflower ‘Steak’ and it seems to me, the wrong approach to set new foods up for comparison with the world of meat because for the sceptics, the analogue imitator is bound to fail at least the taste test, if not the texture, nutrition and appearance tests.
Meat has a strong taste – it is further enhanced by caramelising the outside, and mostly, it is easy to cook and pairs well with equally, simply cooked vegetables – ‘meat and two veg.’ So the first analogue to avoid is just that – why not have a Beetroot Pattie with a Ragout of Stir-fried Vegetables? You don’t need potatoes for carbohydrate since there will be carbohydrate in the pattie and perhaps more in the stir-fried vegetables. Now you are eating something completely different. More of stir-frying later in the challenge, but in case that sounds like a hassle, or you think it takes longer, stir-frying is quick, leaves the vegetables more nutritious and tastes good too and it will take you lees time than boiling potatoes! Since that first encounter with veggie sausages, vegetarian analogues have come a long way, recipes from around the world have turned up on our western shelves, Falafel, for example – or the principle of their cooking, flavours and ingredients, have been incorporated into the latest offerings from the veggie section of the supermarket. Flavours are stronger, chilli alone is incorporated in quantities that would have frightened vegetarians in the 60s. If you cook from scratch, ingredients and spices from around the world are available – although these may take a hit from supply chain problems in the Post Pandemic/ Ukraine scenario. The internet is full of people sharing recipes from all over the world. The before and after cooking photos of vegetarian sausages at top, illustrate some of the vast variety available today – and let’s not forget that consumer demands for choice, have driven meat sausages to more and more additions – cheese, apple, herbs, cranberries, curry spices – so is it so great a stretch to drop the meat altogether and try a meat-free, no a plant-based sausage some nights at the very least?
If you are already Vegetarian, or even Vegan, then I am preaching to the choir, but I hope you may find some ideas or feel free to contribute via the comments, your own experiences, recipes and ideas…
Apples as an Ingredient…
Bramley
I used to say that if there were two foods that I could live off solely, they would be Apples, and Bread! Now that I am older and familial diabetes is kicking in, I try to eat less bread and with both apples and bread, I look for quality and variety rather than quantity! Apples are definitely a food that can be eaten fresh but have spawned a plethora of recipes in which they are the principal ingredient, not to mention drinks, cider and calvados spring to mind.
Apples are divided into dessert and cookers but these are not fixed – you can cook with dessert apples and cookers can become eaters. Due to commercial pressures, the number of varieties easily available, have contracted, so that in Britain, most people will only know of one variety of cooking apple – the Bramley, which you can read about here. But when I was a child and we had two magnificent Bramley trees in the garden, leftovers from the orchard that had existed before the street was built, my parents would carefully select Bramleys, pack them into cushioned trays and store in the attic, where, after the occasional inspection to weed out those that had rotted – we were eventually rewarded with a slightly wrinkled but delicious eating apple. The Bramley, when freshly picked, is too tart for most people to eat, hence it’s utility for cooking, whence it keeps a fruity taste; by contrast, most dessert, or eating apples are too mild in flavour, and once cooked, they are often disappointing, taste-wise. This tartness of cooking apples, means they are full of Pectin – the thing that helps a gel form from sugar in fruit when you are jam-making – hence the combination of, say, Blackberry and Apple Jam, since blackberries do not have enough pectin to set on their own. Recipe quantities couldn’t be easier:-
50% Blackberries
50% Bramley apple
A weight of Sugar equal to the combined fruits.
In case you have never made jam before, I wrote my own simple instructions, since there was always at least one unnecessary instruction in all the ones I searched out and it is in my Theme Reveal.
So I am not saying you should never use dessert apples as ingredients because when it comes to cooking especially, rules are meant to be broken and expediency is the mother of invention – so experiment away. So just what are my favourite English apples? I am not being nationalistic here, but the best apple is an apple fresh, in it’s own season and that means, in it’s own country. There are apples that have been bred to travel such as the tough-skinned, American Red Delicious, or even the French Golden Delicious – which was also American in the first place but was brought in to provide a living for French ex-pats who had been forced out of Algeria. This government-backed scheme did great damage to English varieties with its bland, but long keeping qualities. I rest my case! English seasonal apples vary from the champagne-like burst of flavour of Discovery, early in the season, to the aristocratic sounding, seasonally attired Egremont Russet which comes at the autumnal end of the season.
Discovery Apple
Egremont Russet
You couldn’t imagine two more different apples – Discovery, so red of skin that it continues into the very flesh, which is soft and juicy and a sensual discovery indeed. The Russet is very firm until the exact point of ripeness when it is perfect for a brief moment – and then it goes wooly! But when it is perfectly ripe, it is redolent of Autumn, mellow and mature…
But back to the apple as an ingredient. I once helped set up a wholefood shop wherein we sold some lovely wholefoody cakes, some of which were made for sale in London’s famous Camden Lock. The bakers who made them, were willing to sell them to us, but not ar sufficient wholesale discount, so my boss asked me to reverse engineer them, so here is my recipe for Fresh Apple Oat Cake.
Fill an 8” cake tin, ¾ full of oat Tip into a mixing bowl, add a handful of dried fruit, and grate the largest Bramley apple you can fid into the bowl and mix well Grease the tin and line bottom with baking parchment Spoon mixture in and bake in a moderate oven till the top begins to brown Soften chopped Dates in boiling water until mashable, then spread onto the top of the cooled cake – Enjoy!
You can add, spices of your choice, add extra dried fruit and even grated, creamed coconut for a more luxurious version – but this is the basic cake.
There are so many recipes that use apples as an ingredient – Apple Crumble, Apple Charlotte, Apple Chutney, Red Cabbage and Apple baked in Cider – all of these findable on the internet and you can search as well as I, but I will direct you to one more, based on my most treasured cake recipe book Good Housekeeping’s ‘Cakes and Biscuits’, It is an Apple and Crumbly Cheese Cake – the Lancashire or Cheshire style of cheese is sandwiched between cake batter loaded with chopped apple and nuts – delicious…
On Apples, ‘I could have blogged all night’ – apologies to ‘My Fair Lady’.
