Homegrown Tea & Carrot Top Pesto!

I'm know I'm preaching to the choir here but a fully homegrown lunch does feel pretty good!

I had a forage around the garden and decided if I could pull a meal together from what we have growing for the five of us. My wife and children love a salad type meal and I tried to make it as interesting as possible.

The Ultimate Flapjack Recipe

I've gone a bit oats mad at the moment.

After my microwave porridge post the other day, Spade and Dagger mentioned how they'd been spoilt by using Pim Hill Farm organic oats, and how they tasted way better than what you can normally buy.  

I had a conversation with the lovely people at Pim Hill Farm about trying some of their products. Looking at their website I already loved their ethos and how they grew their product, we don't exclusively buy organic, but we do try to when we can. 

I was stupidly excited when the box turned up, not many people get that excited about oats I can tell you!

Well the kids did, but the box didn't last long! 

First thing to try was the porridge oats. I was almost a little worried, would they be any better?
Well happily I can report that they they take porridge to another level! Much smoother, creamier and somehow they taste more "oaty".

Trouble is I think it might have spoilt the children and no other oats will compare now, gone are the days of budget oats! They sell big 5kg bags for £15.75 on their site which still works out at only 15p a portion (adult). I love buying big bags in bulk anyway, so it suits me!

I was a little unsure what to do with the jumbo oats, then I thought flapjack.
But then I looked in the cupboard and saw that we'd got no golden syrup left, I guess with how much porridge we've been eating lately I shouldn't have been surprised!

Looking to the pantry I saw some condensed milk on the shelf. I remembered that mum used to make awesome flapjack using it. I grabbed the family cookbook and had a look through, she used to make huge batches of this when she had a tea room on the farm.


The Ultimate Flapjack Recipe

Now I know Ultimate is a bold claim but this stuff is simply amazing. 

I even had to ask mum if she minded me giving away this recipe! Mum and friend had a competition to see who could come up with the best recipe, mum lost but we gained her friends recipe so we didn't care! 

The recipe is dead simple:

12oz of jumbo oats
8oz of butter
4oz of soft brown sugar
4 tlbsp condensed milk
4 oz of raisins or chopped dried apricots

Packed down ready to go in the oven

Heat the oven to 160 degrees C, mix the sugar, oats and raisins together. Then add in melted butter and condensed milk and mix. Put in a tray lined with parchment paper then bake for 25 - 30 minutes until done.

Variation
For an amazing variation put one layer of flapjack in the tray, cover with cherry pie filling then add another layer of flapjack on top!

It was so good I had to make it twice - once I'd made one batch I saw half a tin of condensed milk left in the fridge looking all lonely, so I made as second batch the very next day. By the weekend ti was all gone! 

What's your favorite flapjack recipe?

*Pim Hill farm did give me the oats to create this post, but all the views and opinions are my own. 

Raspberry Slice

So many raspberries at the moment it's almost becoming hard to know what to do with them!

But I'm loving my latest recipe I've been messing around with - Raspberry slice! 

Our raspberry patch is about 25ft long and 6ft deep so as you can imagine it produces a fair few raspberries each day at this time of year. I can normally pick a couple of large punnets full every couple of days. I've frozen loads, dehydrated them, made jam, cooked crumbles and I wanted to bake with them more, but not just chucking them in a sponge, that's gets old fast.

So I decided to have a look around the internet and then alter a recipe to suit what I have to hand! 

This turned out really good, everyone loved it and it's got so many raspberries in it it almost has to be healthy!

70g of almond flour,
250g self raising flour,
280g of brown sugar,
200g of butterTwo eggs 500g of raspberries (I used fresh but I think it would work with frozen ones as well)

Mix the flour, almond flour, sugar and melted butter together (I melt the butter just to make it easier to mix together). 
Get about 100g of this mixture and keep to one side.
Then mix in the eggs and pour onto a tray.
Lay half the raspberries all over it and sprinkle on the mixture you held back.
Bake for 45 minutes at 180.
Then get out and add the other half of the raspberries and cook for another 15 minutes.

This tastes amazing!

Great cold or with custard whilst it's still warm. I imagine it would work well with other fruit as well.

Let me know if you give it a try.

Anyone else got a good baking recipe using raspberries?

BBQ Pulled pork

I decided to make it up to my wife over the trotter meal a few weeks ago. I cook a BBQ pulled pork shoulder.

I'm going to write it here as I was quite pleased with it and it tasted amazing, I couldn't find a recipe I liked so I just made one up, normally this is a recipe for disaster...

Not a great picture but it tasted good!

1 pork shoulder (mine was de-boned)
2 onions,
5 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon of cumin
4 teaspoons of paprika,
1 teaspoon of salt
black pepper
1 teaspoon of mustard powder
vegetable oil
1 carton of Tomato passata
1/2 a cup of cider vinegar

I fried up the onions and the garlic in a frying pan until soft then added them to the pot.

Mix all the spices together and then rub all over the meat, then brown the meat off in the pan.

Put the meat in the pot and then add all the other ingredients. Get a cup of water and deglaze the frying pan with it then add it to the pot as well. 

I cooked mine in a slow cooker for about 7 hours on low, turning it up to high for the last hour. I also removed some of the sauce and reduced this down separately to make a thick BBQ sauce to have on top. The whole shoulder pulled apart with a couple of forks when it was ready to eat.

I served it with roast potatoes and veg the first night, then it went on to make some amazing sandwiches the next day and the following night I fried it all back up, added a tin of red kidney beans and a tin of tomatoes and served it with rice - another great meal! 

Who else likes it when the leftovers are almost better then the original meal!

Hummus Recipe

When my wife and I moved in together, many years ago, there were many foods I discovered that I liked that I either didn't think I did or didn't know existed, she introduced me to a world of flavours! Hummus was one of them. I'd never tried it before and discovered I loved it.

To start with we only really used it as a dip, with raw peppers or tortilla crisps (or chips for the Americans). Then I started using it in sandwiches and although you receive a certain amount of stick for having hummus in you sandwiches on a building site, it was worth it to break the monotony of ham or cheese (or ham and cheese if we were feeling flush that week). 

But now I'd like to make my own, rather than spending 90p on a little pot of the stuff and with chickpeas only 39p a tin from Lidl it makes it worth making at home. My wife also has a project making some at school for their Greece project next term and needs an easy recipe for the children to make.

The only trouble is I could do with decent recipe, it can't contain peanut butter (due to the school not allowing it) so Tahini is the order of the day and so far the batches I've made have been nice but the garlic is a little over powering.

Anyone else like hummus?

Any tips or recipes from anyone would be gratefully received.

Tomato Tarte Tatin

We've so many tomatoes at the moment it's tricky to know what to do with them all.

One of our favourite meals with them is this tarte tatin.

Simply fill a roasting dish with cherry tomatoes, a good glug of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, some chopped up rosemary and thyme. Then roll out the puff pastry to fit the dish then spread pesto over it and place it face down on the dish. Tuck in the edges and roast for about 30 minutes until the pastry is cooked and golden.

This is a lovely easy dish served with some other summer veg and new potatoes. 

Also if it's all home grown it works out to be very cheap as well!

Dairy Free Carrot Cake

My wife has been working her way through our big bag of carrots that we got given.
This is good for me as it means one thing - cake!

Poor quality photo sorry - but it tastes amazing!

She's been playing with the recipe and I'd say its as near to perfect as it's going to get:

175g light muscovado sugar
175ml vegetable oil
3 eggs, beaten
175g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp of cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground ginger
3 large carrots, grated
200g raisins
good splash of orange juice

Mix the sugar, oil and eggs together,
Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices,
Add orange juice, carrots and raisins,
Stir well and put into a greased/lined tin,
Bake at 180 degrees c for 45 minutes or until cooked.

Makes a lovely moist cake. You could add walnuts to the mixture if you wanted (we haven't got any at the moment) and you could make an icing to go on top. We decided not to have icing because otherwise our little girl just eats that and leaves the cake, whereas with no icing she eats the cake like it's the last one she's ever going to have!