Yearly Archives: 2010

Chocolate chestnut brownies

Dan Lepard’s Chocolate Chestnut Brownies

I like the chocolate part very much, moussey and light in texture, just lovely in fact! However the freshly roasted chestnuts might have been the wrong thing to use, Dan Lepard specifies tinned ones in the recipe – I think I would leave them out altogether and just use the brownie part as a delectable chocolate dessert with lots of icecream. I think my taste buds don’t register chestnuts in desserts; they become strangely tasteless once they are combined with sugar. I am not too keen on them in bread either.

In my heart of hearts I really only like chestnuts straight from the shell, with some salt and black pepper and maybe a dab of butter. They’re good with sprouts and bacon at Christmas and I would like to try Azelia’s soup which has shitake mushrooms and lentils in it as well as chestnuts and sounds savoury and delicious.

Outside the back door

I'm still standing, yeah yeah yeah

It may be the 1st of November but this Chinese broccoli is looking very enthusiastic and the cardoons are sprouting like nobody’s business. I am tempted by Robin’s tweet to pick a few stems and see if I can turn them into food. I always thought you had to tie the plant up in brown paper and blanch the stems for many weeks and I have just left them to be gloriously ornamental and make flowers for the bees.

How do you cook these Robin?

This week’s task is to plant the new garlic and replant some of the giant singles that we raised earlier in the year by mistake. I’ve been eyeing up DocFugawe’s winter garden which is a long way away in Oregon and thinking that we should have tried some of those good looking greens he has, but it’s probably too late to sow new stuff now. We’ll have to make do with the chard and the broccoli.

My last handful of beans and friends

There is also a row of teeny tiny leek babies which need transplanting. If I write this down here, I might actually do it this week. Promises, promises.

Not garlic but cucumbers! A gifted plant produced enough baby cucumbers for a whole jar of pickles!

I have learnt that garlic needs to have a month at a cold temperature in order to divide into cloves – if you plant it and it doesn’t get that cold month, then you just get one big bulb. We have a whole bunch of those which we have been eating, and they are fine. The bonus of getting that wrong is that you can apparently re plant them at the right time of the year and then they will turn into properly divided big garlics in due course.

I'll wake up one morning and the leaves will all be gone

Sola resurgit vita

Ottolenghi’s One-Pan Wonder and Suelle’s Chocolate Pear Pudding

ottolenghi in the Guardian Tidying up the living room today I found a carefully torn out page from the Guardian from July 24 2010. We loved the idea of dinner made with one pot, so Brian decided to make it. We had lots of little tomatoes, potatoes, all the ingredients and we wanted a meat-less meal so The New Vegetarian scored again!

Brian says, you do need a second pot to roast the tomatoes, though I suppose at a pinch you could cook the tomatoes first and put them to one side and then carry on. If I was camping this might be the sort of dish that I could just about put together outdoors. I’m not very good at camping though.

It’s a lovely supper dish and has those gorgeous Ottolenghi flavours, yoghurt, lemon, sumac, chili and tahini all cooked with a generous quantity of olive oil and I could eat it again really soon.

ottolenghi tomato tahini eggs potatoes

The method of cooking the eggs, on top of a base of pan cooked potatoes and onions reminds me a little of baked egg dishes, it worked pretty well and even though it stuck a little to the pan, there wasn’t any left over!

We followed it up by re-heating Suelle’s scrummy pear and chocolate pudding cake that I made on Tuesday and having it with yet more pears which I had poached in vanilla syrup, something I learnt from Azelia’s Kitchen which is in fact where I am popping back soon as she has a whole collection of fabulous dessert recipes for pears!

chocolate pear pudding mainly baking We like pudding in this house, but we don’t have it very often, so it was great to have this to re-heat. I think we put too much of the chocolate pieces in the middle of the cake, so it ran in a rather nice gooey fashion everywhere.