Soup and Nettles

We have been having soup most days for lunch. I love soup! I have always made soup, but in the last year, leading a life that was just a little bit too busy meant that I did not always get around to making soup. So for Christmas, two of our kids clubbed together and bought me a soup maker. I have used it so much since then. All you have to do is empty some roughly chopped veg in the soupmaker, add some herbs and maybe some garlic, fill with water or last night's vegetable cooking water, turn it on - and 21 minutes later, there is soup.

The last two times, I have made nettle soup. Lovely! As a child, I remember being told that nettle soup was really good for you and in the spring, it cleansed the system after the winter. I can also remember sitting at the table for hours looking at my first bowl of nettle soup. I was told that I would be sitting at the table until such times as I finished it. The trouble is that nobody had told me that I would not get stung in the mouth by eating nettle soup. After all, every other time any part of me had touched a nettle, I had suffered afterwards. I don't remember how that incident ended but I do know that I love nettle soup now : )

Nettle soup - my way:

I used a large potato, gave it a scrub and chopped it roughly into the soupmaker. I didn't bother peeling it. I peeled an onion and chopped it into quarters and added that. I took my 2 litre measuring jug and some scissors and went into the garden and snipped off the top shoots of nettles until my measuring jug was full. Then I washed them (carefully! because I did not want my skin to touch them) and added them to the soupmaker. Then I added a half teaspoon of garlic granules, a good shake of mixed dried herbs, two vegetable stock cubes and filled the jug of the soupmaker up to the marked line with water. I turned it on and 21 minutes later, there was soup ready to eat for lunch. I did enjoy it and I hoped it was doing me some good as a bonus : )

I have several nettles growing in the garden and won't let my husband dig them up as he wants to because they are such useful plants. I take an empty and washed out milk bottle, don some gloves and take it up the garden with my kitchen scissors. I cut off the stems of nettle leaves and stuff as many as I can into the milk bottle. I use the scissors as tongs to fit the stems into the bottle. When it is as full as I can get it, I fill it with water, put the lid on and leave it in the shade around the back of the shed for a month or six weeks - and I have a nasty smelling liquid feed for my veg in pots. Free for 5-10 minutes work. It does a good job too.

Back to the old routine

Yesterday I spent down at church in the kitchen, cooking yet again. I had lots of broccoli that I had bought in Asda at 20p each and almost a kilo of stilton that I had bought on super special offer so I made 54 x 350ml portions of broccoli and stilton soup. I wanted to get it made while the broccoli was still fresh enough. I don't normally make that flavour of soup because it is just too expensive. I do love it though and brought home the pot scrapings to have as my lunch today. Yum!

I also baked three lots of cake to go in the freezer which was just about bare. Too many Christmas shoppers calling in to have a cuppa and to recoup their energy for the next round of shopping. I shall be back in the kitchen on Monday as usual to try and get that freezer stocked a bit fuller. The coffee shop is closed for a week between Christmas and New Year so there are no customers at the moment to eat everything I am making. The staff are doing a deep clean of everywhere while they have the opportunity. I have been looking on the internet looking for a few recipes to broaden my menu. I have my regular basics but I am looking for a few more recipes that are not complicated to make but look and taste good and are inexpensive to boot. As a charity, we don't aim to make a profit but we do need a small surplus as our chairs are about ten years old and are suddenly starting to look it, as furniture often does. Last year the chairs were all looking fine but this year they have needed to be mended frequently and there are cracks starting to appear on the seat pads. so we need a little bit of profit to buy new chairs with. If anyone has a favourite recipe that would be useful to me at the coffee shop, then please do share it : )

Blackberry cake update

I ventured out into the garden and picked the last half pound of blackberries and put them into a cake as was done by Kev Alviti and mentioned in my post before last. I have to say it was absolutely scrumptious : )

Blackberry Cake

4 ozs marg
4 ozs sugar
6 ozs SR flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
2 tbsps milk
2 eggs
8 ozs blackberries

Cream marg and sugar
Beat in eggs
Stir in flour and baking powder
Stir in milk to get the right consistency
Stir in blackberries

Turn into a 7" x 11" tin lined with baking paper.
Bake for 35 minutes at 160'C fan/350'F/gas mark 4

Absolutely fabulous flavour and so easy. I will definitely be baking this again next blackberry season.

Elderflower champagne

I managed to pick some elderflowers last week before the weather turned to rain. I've got some in the freezer to make gooseberry and elderflower jam and some to make elderflower cordial and I made some elderflower champagne with the rest. Lovely! And so easy, too. I use some Milton to sterilise the lemonade bottles before filling them.

Elderflower champagne

8 pints cold water

1 1/2 lbs sugar

1 lemon, sliced

3 tabsps cider vinegar

8 flowerheads

Put all ingredients in a large container and stir until sugar is dissolved.

Cover container to keep dust out.

Stir each day for a week or until there is a yeasty smell, when it is ready to drink.

Put in lemonade bottles and store in fridge.

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Lemonade

I happened upon some yellowstickered lemons this week - 4 lemons in a pack for 8p : )
So I decided to make some lemonade. I haven't made any for years. I used to make it when the children were small if I found lemons on offer. The lemons this week were lovely plump ones and unwaxed too. I love this hot or cold. Today was a hot day and I had this cold but diluted with sparkling water rather than tap water. It definitely hit the spot this afternoon.

This is my recipe that I was given years ago. As I had 4 lemons, I made 80% of the quantity:

Lemonade

5 lemons
4 pints boiling water
3 lbs sugar
2 ozs citric acid

Grate the lemon rind into a large saucepan.
Cut off as much pith as possible from the lemons, cut them into quarters and blitz in the food processor.
Add blitzed lemon and the other ingredients to the saucepan and stir until the sugar has dissolved.
Leave to cool.
When cool, bottle and store in the fridge.

Lemonade is a slight misnomer as it needs to be diluted. If there is space in the freezer, you could always put the lemonade into small bottles and get one out of the freezer at a time. Or make a half quantity.

I find that 2 tablespoons is about right for a half pint mug of water and I like it both hot and cold. It is also nice diluted with sparkling water.

I'm not sure how long it will keep in the fridge as it is so long since I made it but it is at least 3 weeks. When the kids were all home, keeping it was not a problem!

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Pickle recipe

This recipe is for one of our favourite pickles.  It is not expensive to make and you can play around a little bit with the quantities and it will still be fine.  I found the recipe originally in a book from the 1970s by Alison Burt called "Preserves and Pickles".  I thought I'd share it because it is so easy.

It is a recipe that gives an amount of "prepared apple" which I really like because you can use windfalls.  If you only have a box of windfalls then it is a bit difficult to judge how many bits of reasonable apple equal the amount of whole apple in the recipe.  My ancient jam recipe book (HMSO book from the 1960s) also tends to take the "prepared apple" approach. 

Sweet Pickle with Apple

2 lbs apple (prepared)
2 cucumbers
4 large onions
1/2 pint brown malt vinegar
8 ozs white sugar
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon each ground ginger and turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Peel cucumber and cut into 1/4 inch dice.
Peel and chop onions finely.
Place prepared apple, onions and cucumber in a pan with all the remaining ingredients.
Bring to the boil, stirring all the time to make sure the sugar is dissolved.
Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.
Put the pickle into hot, clean jars and seal immediately.

Notes on how I did it this time:
I didn't have any turmeric so I left it out.
My celery seed has a price label of 40p and it must be ancient - so I was generous with it.
One of my cucumbers had gone off so I just used one.
My onions were what I would have called "medium" so I used five.
I had a small amount of spiced vinegar left from last autumn's preserving so I used that.

I've had a bug and am off work so I couldn't face standing to do all that chopping and I used the food processor to chop it all.  Next time I might use the grater attachment as processed cucumber was a bit of a mistake...  All the previous times I've made this pickle, I've chopped everything finely by hand and it does give a nicer looking pickle but the key thing is the taste.  After all, when the pickle is in a sandwich, I can't see whether everything is neatly chopped or not : )

This pickle will be ready to eat before Christmas.  It is sweet and tangy and is wonderful in a cheese sandwich.  If you like your pickle hot and spicy, then add something to pep it up.  It is a very tolerant pickle. It also keeps well.  I've got a jar from the batch I made three years ago and it is just lovely.

Edited to say that this quantity made 8 jars this time.  The jars were all smaller pickle jars that would have held about 12ozs or a little bit less.

Birthday biscuits.

It was my birthday this week - one of those annoying great fat ones with a big "O" at the end of it.  Now it is traditional at work to take in goodies to share, so I made biscuits.  Most people go to a supermarket and buy those boxes of mini flapjacks, brownies etc.  This does not fit well with me so the biscuits I made were not only nicer than the bought treats but much cheaper too.  I have to admit that they cost me a bit more in time but when you add up the cost (in time and in diesel too) of going from the house to the nearest supermarket, picking up what you need, queuing at the checkout and coming home again, I'm not sure that there is much in it.

Since people at work are accustomed to those mini treats, I admit that I made those biscuits a bit on the small side so that I got more out of a batch and I did heat up the main oven because I only have one little baking tray that fits in the mini oven.  I made about 80 to take to school and 120 slightly bigger ones to take to church this morning and a few extra (mainly the misshapes) for us.  I also made myself a chocolate cake to have at home and another one to take to school to share with the group of friends that I had tea with at breaktime.  My husband asked me why I had to work so hard when it was my birthday and I haven't come up with an answer to that yet...

However, since I have been sharing biscuits with all and sundry, I thought I would share the recipe with you so you can have a biscuit too. It is really easy but tastes really good.  I've done some of them with a teaspoon of ground ginger and some finely chopped crystallised ginger in them (courtesy of Approved Food last year) and those in particular were absolutely wonderful. I'll definitely be doing them with ginger again.


Mary Berry's Fork Biscuits

100g (4ozs) butter, softened (I used Clover since that was what I had)
50g (2 ozs) caster sugar (I used granulated)
150g (5 ozs) selfraising flour

Preheat the oven to 180'C/fan 160'C/gas mark 4

Cream butter and then gradually beat in the sugar and then the flour.

Bring the mixture together with your hands to form a dough.

Form dough into about 16 balls the size of a walnut and place spaced well apart on a baking tray.

Dip a fork in water and use this to flatten the biscuits.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until pale golden.

Lift off the baking tray and leave to cool on a wire rack. 

When cold, store in an airtight container - if there are any left by then : )

Simples!  and very tasty - and very easy.  This would be a good one for children to do, too.