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« ATP tennis at the O2 - again | Main | Books in November »

Sunday November 22, 2015

Stir-Up Sunday

Apparently I have not done any stirring up (on this blog at any rate) since 2008 - and rather like that year, it all seems rather early.

ClementineOrangeMarmalade.jpg

A week ago I made some rather splendid cranberry and clementine marmalade - Waitrose 3 for 2 having produced a localised domestic glut of clementines and then to my surprise, Sainburys having fresh cranberries in stock. In fact, I had a recipe for this from a Sainsburys magazine, which I then lost and could not find on line. In principle of course you could use any marmalade recipe but the proportion of sugar is harder to gauge when you vary the the fruit. But... Caroline to the rescue with the recipe on her perfectly splendid blog The Patterned Plate... and delicious it has turned out to be. [Flushed with success I went on to make ginger marmalade - which was yummy though did not taste quite as much of ginger or oranges as I had expected {was driven to stir in whisky} - the main attraction was that it also involved apples - see reference to "apple glut" below...]

This weekend I made my Christmas puddings. In 2008 I claimed I "always" used Jocelyn Dimblebey's recipe - which was true until 2010. In that year we discovered we had a quince tree in France - a bit naive about quinces, we thought they were rather hard pears that never ripened and grew fluffy mould! That same year Alison referred me to Nigella's recipe which involves quinces and I have used it ever since. It is very fruity and also involves marron glacé - yum - which Waitrose staff always irritate me by claiming is unheard of and yet is always in stock! (This year as a variation they tried to press pureed chestnuts on me.)
I also found that Nigel Slater has an online recipe with quinces - and figs which will be ever more perfect if our fig tree ever produces any - so I have also tried that one. Note that in both recipes the quinces can be replaced by grated apple, and like my original favourite pudding they are both made with a base of breadcrumbs. [There was some mixture left over that I made into a tiny "taster" pudding which we ate right away and it was simply delicious - hard to see how the flavours could mature to be even better!]

We also have a glut of apples from the garden here so for the cake of the moment (to eat now) I made my Almond Apple cake - originally from Mary Berry so bound to be good.

Posted by Christina at 9:11 AM. Category: Kitchen and food

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