Category Archives: Plants and Trees

Pumpkin Pie is a Go!

westonbirt I bought a pumpkin at Leigh Court Farm the other day. I had this idea I was going to carve it with a Halloween poodle cut out and scare all those trick-and-treating dogs that come visiting; that was a little overambitious. I cut the lid off crooked and it was all downhill from there on, I failed miserably in fact…

…Time for Plan B

pumpkin pie

Pumpkin Pie!

The last time I made this I was nineteen and trying to impress a friend who was mad about all things American. I produced something so revolting that we had to go to a very expensive café instead to calm ourselves down and get rid of the taste. I decided on the strength of that experience that America was indeed a foreign country and that they ate some very strange food there. It occured to me briefly that I might have made it wrong but my ego was such that I simply relegated it to the little drawer of gustatory horrors (the one where the boiled pigs trotters that I was offered once in Greece resides) and thought no more about it.

Fast forward to November ’09 when Mandy invited me for a proper Thanksgiving supper at which there was turkey and corn bread and for dessert there was a pie like this one. Much to my surprise it was really good so I removed PP from the drawer of horrors and promised myself I would make it one day.

What did I do wrong all those years ago? At a guess I didn’t drain the pumpkin purée properly. If you use one of those big round orange jobs then you have to really drain the purée before you mix up the filling. I think that’s all there is to remember, it might be why Americans tend to buy the purée in tins. But I couldn’t find a tin of the stuff and I did have my failed Jack O’Poodle.

I read the Guardian piece on pumpkin pie but really didn’t fancy making a pie with 145 g of maple syrup. The recipe I chose in the end is more or less the one Mandy recommended from the hummingbird bakery cookbook There are some great looking American cakes in there! And the recipes are all in grams not cups which suits me fine.

To prepare the pumpkin purée: We cut the pumpkin into chunks, roasted them in the oven until they were soft for 45 minutes at 170 C. Then I scraped the flesh off the skins. Puréed the flesh in a food processor till smooth. Put the whole lot in a sieve and let it drip overnight. I toasted the seeds separately and have been doing my impersonation of a gerbil ever since.

I found a dish as near to 23 cm in diameter as I possessed; a flan dish with a drop out bottom, a proper pie dish is on my wish list now!

I used the Hummingbird pie crust which is made of

260 grams plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
110 g unsalted butter

The pastry is made by rubbing the above ingredients together to a sandy consistency and then bringing the pastry together with a little water, maybe a tablespoon or so. The Hummingbird book talks about beating the pastry until you have a smooth even dough. I followed all this and the crust that results is what I would call a hardish pastry, the sort that you can hold in your hand without it collapsing. I think if I was going to make the pie again I would use a pastry with more butter and not mix it so much as I prefer a shorter textured pastry, but this was good. I am not such a pastry expert anyway. Whatever pastry you use, always chill it in the fridge after you have mixed it, and ideally once again after you have rolled it out for your dish. An hour is usually plenty of time for the first chill.

I roll out pastry these days between two sheets of clingfilm and it makes life a lot easier.

At some point measure out and mix the following ingredients together until you have a smooth lumpfree mixture.

425g pumpkin purée
1 medium egg
235 ml evaporated milk
220 g golden caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground cardamom ( instead of cloves which I don’t like)
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground cinammon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 – 2 tablespoons plain flour

Pour this into the pastry and bake in a preheated oven at 170 º C/325 ºF until the filling is firm. The book says 30 – 40 minutes but mine took more like an hour.

I left it to cool till the next day and we just had some for lunch with a big dollop of yoghurt and a sprinkle of cinammon on the top and it was so good I had two pieces!

Greed is my undoing.

Help me identify this house plant!

Auntie Vera

This is nothing to do with baking.

Do any of you lovely knowledgeable people know what this plant is called? I was given a piece of the stem and told to cut it into three and plant it in some soil, six months later it looks like this.

Some sort of succulent, very enthusiastic about life in general, grows huge long stems that then break off under their own weight.

It came from someone’s great aunt, hence the “Auntie Vera’ moniker. It hasn’t flowered yet so no clues there.

The truth is out there…. one of you must know it! (edit : see the comments for the identity of this plant)

Edit: Almost a year on (Nov 2011) having replanted sections in the summer, we moved one pot into the bathroom where it is warm and steamy and quite light in the window and it has produced amazing flowers. See below:

Guess who has decided to flower after all this time?

The Larch Boletus

When I lived in London, I used to pick a lot of wild mushrooms, the parks, and the Surrey woodlands were full of them.

My mother was good on identification, my aunts and uncles too, the knowledge passed on from one generation to another, backed up by books and photos. I have some, not altogether reassuring, memories of my female relatives arguing over a particularly luridly coloured specimen, saying,

‘Of course, this is a good one! ’

and then to my horror, chewing little bits and pulling faces and spitting them out….

…anyway, all I can say is that no one died and no one got ill, though I have met plenty of people who claim to know someone who knows someone who died of eating mushrooms. Of course, there are headline grabbing deadly mushrooms, like the Destroying Angel – what a name! And there are mushrooms that will make you very sick and people do die from eating them every year. You can look up the statistics on these things, though what they don’t say is how many people safely and responsibly pick wild mushrooms each year.

If you want to pick mushrooms you need to find someone to show you which ones are good and far more importantly which ones are bad and also which ones have look-alikes that can be confused. You need to read, study, and observe. There are maybe a dozen ‘good’ mushrooms that I am certain of; any I don’t know I leave them where they grow. There are books, on-line resources, fungi groups, all sorts of places to find out more. Take your time and do your homework.

In some European countries you can take your mushrooms to be identified by an expert before eating them, as far as I know we don’t have that service here.

A few days ago walking the dogs in a glade of larches, we found these little beauties, called larch boletus or sulleius grevellei …… They only grow under larch trees; hence the name. Of course other fungi grow under larch trees, so you need to know the other characteristics of the mushroom as well. We picked a pound of them and took them home, where I cleaned them up, double checked my identification with Roger Phillips and various other reliable references and made duxelles with them as in Antonio Carluccio’s A Passion for Mushrooms.

Duxelles are a very simple way to store and freeze all mushrooms: slice some onions, fry them gently, add a little nutmeg if you like it and then add the cleaned and sliced mushrooms and cook them gently. Once the liquid has evaporated, you let them cool down and then either chop them finely and freeze in an ice cube tray so you can pop them in a bag and use them to enrich soups and stews, or just freeze them as they are. Some mushrooms dry well or can be pickled but Carluccio doesn’t recommend that for the larch boletus. This mushroom is good, but not one of the greats like porcini or morels!

So I put some in the freezer for a risotto in a few weeks time, and kept a few to go with our dinner adding a little garlic, lemon juice, parsley and cream. The sweet and earthy aroma of these mushrooms is like nothing else….together with a few of our tender garden charlotte potatoes, a piece of locally raised sirloin steak from Cotswold Edge Farm, some bright and joyful english runner beans. That was a great supper!

Do you have any special dishes you like to make with mushrooms?