What use is a conker?

Conkers are funny things, aren't they? What is it that makes them so appealing when they are completely useless? Why do children (big and small) love collecting them with such enthusiasm?

I have pondered these questions this past fortnight as I have sat on my usual spot on the bench in the park whilst my girls have proudly brought me their collected conkers to show me. They are undoubtedly beautiful things, especially when first released from their prickly shells, all shiny and with their grain still showing. They feel lovely in the hand too and if you hold two or three of them you can't help but rotate them round and round in your hands.

There is no question of course that the girls will want to take them home. But what then? What can you do with conkers? With my hazelnut tree producing such a bountiful harvest of edible nuts it strikes me as a shame that conkers are not edible. Indeed, even squirrels don't seem to bother with them. In fact, if it weren't for children collecting them all up, the footpaths would be awash with conkers at this time of year.

So inevitably the conkers accumulate in the corner of the garden, eventually to rot.

But then this week, one of my friends commented on the large numbers of spiders in her house at this time of year. It is the same here, as I imagine it is in everyone else's houses at this time of year - unless you have a cat, as I am told they enjoy these crunching snacks. Generally speaking I'm not that bothered by spiders. Having to remove their cobwebs is a nuisance but their fly catching abilities are useful, particularly in my household where the excessive amount of fruit and veg that passes through my kitchen leads to annoying fruit flies in the kitchen. They really are annoying actually. Within minutes of bringing in a punnet of raspberries from the allotment this afternoon, a cloud of fruit flies were circling above them. Then with the raspberries used up in a crumble, the fruit flies were left circling the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. I have two sticky fly tapes up (not the most attractive addition to my kitchen, it has to be said) and one of those electric fly traps that kills flies with a satisfying zapping sound, yet still they circle. And right outside my kitchen window lives a big fat garden spider, getting bigger and fatter daily on a feast of flies. So I have a happy relationship with this spider but I'm not so keen on those great, big, enormous black things that suddenly appear from under the bookcase and scuttle across the living room carpet whilst we are watching TV of an evening. Steve has put 4 of them out this week and my eldest was somewhat alarmed to find a shed spider skin on the kitchen floor the other day as she was quick to realise that this merely meant that the spider was now BIGGER!!

So what has all this got to do with conkers? Well... in my friend's discussion about the spiders, I found out that there are quite a few people out there who firmly believe that scattering conkers around your house keeps spiders at bay. Apparently, they don't like the smell. Is this true? I don't know but it sounds like it is worth a try. So one of the jobs on my to-do list this weekend is to dust off the conker pile and scatter them under the book case, on the window sills and under my bed. An end to spiders in my house and a use for the conker - sounds good to me!

Hooray for hazelnuts

During the course of my childhood at various points we had in our garden a rosemary bush (my mum's name), sweet william flowers (my dad's name), and house martins (my brother's name), but we never managed to plant a hazel tree. So when I finally got my own home I planted one. It took it about 10 years before it yielded its first handful of nuts and now, at 13 years old it produces quite a reasonable crop of nuts.

I expect I'm bias, but I do love my hazel tree. I love the way the hazelnuts conveniently drop to the ground when they are ready, without damaging themselves. And how they patiently wait for you to get around to eating them without threatening to go rotten in the meantime. And just a gentle squeeze of the nutcracker lets you through their shell to the nut inside.

Back in 2009 I proudly blogged about using my first handful of hazelnuts; a yield of just a couple of ounces that I turned into hazelnut & sesame florentines. It is a delicious recipe so I started with it this year but it barely made an impression on the nut harvest.

Hazelnut and Sesame Florentines (makes 12-16)

1 1/2 oz (40g) unsalted butter

1 1/2 oz (40g) golden syrup

1/2 oz (15g) plain flour

1 1/2 oz (40g) chopped hazelnuts

1 1/2 oz (40g) sesame seeds

1 oz (25g) glace cherries

1 oz (25g) dried mixed fruit

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas 4 and line a large baking sheet. Melt together the butter and the syrup in a pan over a gentle heat then remove from the heat and add all the other ingredients. Stir well and leave for 2-3 minutes. Dollop teaspoons of the mixture well spaced out on the baking paper then bake for 5-8 minutes until golden. Cool on the sheet for 2-3 minutes then transfer onto a wire rack to cool completely.

After that, I scanned my blog archives to remind me what I did with my hazelnut harvest in 2010. Back in October 2010 I made a harvest fruit cake with hazelnuts, courgettes and an apple. With the same ingredients in abundance this year I decided to do the same. A lovely, substantial fruitcake, which lasted us all week but which too did not use up all the hazelnuts.

Harvest Fruit Cake

2oz (55g) shelled hazelnuts

8oz (225g) unsalted butter

8oz (225g) light muscovado sugar

8oz (225g) self-raising flour

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 teaspoons mixed spice

1 teaspoon baking powder

6oz (175g) courgette or marrow

1 apple

9oz (250g) mixed dried fruit

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon demerara sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas 4 and grease or line a 20cm round cake tin. Place 1 oz of the hazelnuts in a food processor with a spoonful of sugar and a spoonful of flour and blitz until the nuts are finely ground. Add the butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour and baking powder and process until a smooth batter forms. Remove the blade and grate in the courgette or marrow and the apple then add the dried fruit. Stir thoroughly and spoon the mix into the cake tin. Coarsely chop the remaining hazelnuts and mix these with the cinnamon and demerara sugar. Sprinkle this mixture onto the top of the cake. Bake for 45 minutes then cover with foil and continue to bake for a further 25-30 minutes. Test with a skewer. Cool in the tin for 20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.

So, with my eldest daughter's challenge of making a cheesecake recipe book still in my mind, I decided to have a go at making a hazelnut cheesecake.

Chocolate Hazelnut Cheesecake

Base:

2 oz shelled hazelnuts

4 oz digestive biscuits

2 oz melted butter

Filling:

8 oz soft cheese

3 oz caster sugar

1 egg

4 fl oz whipping cream

1 dessert spoon cocoa powder

Few drops vanilla extract

Topping:

2 oz roasted hazelnut, chopped.

Blitz the hazelnuts, then the biscuits, in a food processor to make crumbs then mix with the melted butter. Press into a suitable ovenproof tin. Refrigerate for 1 hour or more. Preheat an oven to 180°C, gas 4. Cream together the cheese and sugar then mix in the egg and cream. Pour 8 fl oz into a jug and add the cocoa to this portion. Add the vanilla to the remaining portion. Independently whip each portion until thick. Dollop the two portions of cheese mixture onto the biscuit base and gently fold them together to produce a marbled effect. Bake for 20 minutes then switch out the oven and leave for another 10 minutes. Then open the oven door and leave the cheesecake inside to slowly cool to prevent it cracking. Once cool, chill for an hour or so until ready to serve. In the meantime, roast the raw hazelnuts in their shells for 15 minutes at 180°C, gas 4. Leave to cool then whizz in a food processor to chop. When ready to serve the cheesecake, scatter the hazelnuts on top. Serve with cream or ice-cream, if desired.

I'm pleased to report the cheesecake was a success. I'm also pleased to say that I still have enough nuts left to make another one!

Award winning hand-made ice-cream

Regular readers of my blog will know that I enjoy making ice-cream but I never expected to get an award for it! This changed the other day when I entered the Farr Beach sandcastle competition. Inspired by a beach ice-cream set that I picked up in IKEA for a few pounds, we decided that this year’s entry would be a sand ice-cream van.

First we dug out a large hole and built up walls to make the outline structure of the ice-cream van and then the girls created a series of different ice-creams in cones and ice-cream sundaes to “sell” at the counter. This was the most fun part, trying to find suitable substitutes for yummy ingredients on the beach. Dry sand for vanilla, damp sand for caramel flavours. Green seaweed for mint. Small sticks as chocolate flakes, red pebbles as cherries, seaweed as chocolate sauce.

After an hour of digging, sculpting and creating, the ice-cream van and its stock was finished. Then, the judges walked up and down the beach, assessing each castle. We all gathered together at the end of the beach to hear the announcements – in reverse order of course. 3rd then 2nd places… then finally, 1st place for the ice-cream van! What a lovely surprise and a brilliant way to end an enjoyable, fun, family day out on the beach. Funnily enough, as we left the beach that afternoon we all fancied an ice-cream, sadly though my stock of real home-made ice-creams was in the freezer at home 600 miles away!

A Kitchen Gardener on holiday- Part 2

By the time we needed to visit the supermarket again we were running low on homegrown vegetables too. There were still plenty of spuds and alliums, courgettes and French beans but the broad beans, peas and beetroot were eaten. It is somewhat surprising that vegetables such as courgettes and French beans should still be edible after a 600 mile car journey and 6 days out of the ground but compared to the journeys some fruit and vegetables have to arrive in supermarkets its nothing.

When homegrown is not available I like to shop local instead and this is probably easier here than anywhere in the UK. The Scots are very proud of anything Scottish so supermarkets are stocked with Scottish products including everything from haggis to cheese to carrots. And with the different pace of life up here, where Tescos only arrived a couple of years ago, there are still thriving local specialist shops such as butchers and fishmongers. It makes a pleasant change to shop in places like this and the whole family actively enjoys our shopping trips.

So a 40 minute, 30 mile drive to Thurso isn’t the chore it might be if this was something I had to do every week of the year. Instead we look forward to it, made more enjoyable by the ease of parking near to each of the shops we visit. First to MacKay’s the butchers – a large, rotund man with ruddy cheeks who was clearly born to be a butcher. He greeted us in his usual friendly way, recognising us from previous annual visits. All his meat is local, of course, and can be cut to order if necessary. His sausages are the highlight of our trip and my daughter claims they are the only sausages she likes. Here we stocked up on fillet steak, leg of lamb, a chicken and sausages as well as “olives”, pieces of frying steak wrapped round a sage and onion stuffing. I’ve never seen these anywhere else so enjoy having them when I can just because they are a bit different. We also bought half a dozen local free-range eggs and a punnet of Caithness grown strawberries.

A very short drive to the quayside and we parked this time outside the fishmongers. It is also right by our favourite café “The Tempest” and although we were all starving we decided to visit the fishmongers first as this, like the butchers, still have the quirky habit of closing for lunch. Like so many places up here this is also called “MacKay’s” but a different and unrelated MacKay to the butchers (Sutherland is of course Clan MacKay country). Here Steve stocked up on a pot of crabmeat, some enormous fresh scallops and a wedge of Orkney cheese before we headed into the café for lunch. I can’t help marvelling at the car park – a huge expanse of tarmac at the quayside, next to several shops and a popular café and with a seaview, overlooking the Orkney Islands. Firstly, it is remarkable because there are absolutely no road marking in it so you can park wherever you choose. Secondly, it is completely free of charge. And thirdly, it is almost entirely empty. Imagine such a car park in Cornwall, closely packed bay markings, pay and display and full by 9am.

Nicely stocked up with a variety of fresh, local produce we drove back to the cottage in excited anticipation of our next meal.

A Kitchen Gardener on holiday- Part 1

When you love kitchen gardening as much as I do, it is a bit of a strain to leave it behind for 3 weeks to go on holiday. To lessen the strain, firstly, I have perfected the timing of my summer holiday to slot neatly between the end of broad beans and the beginning of the French beans, and between the end of the soft fruit and the beginning of the tree fruit. Secondly, I make sure there are people back home who can keep an eye on the plot whilst we are away and to keep picking the produce to stop them going over.

Before leaving on holiday I went around the plot picking everything that I could to take away. The peas and mangetout were winding down but I got a small bag of each. The broad beans I thought were over but got a few new pods from re-grown shoots. The first of the French beans were ready so I picked everything I could from these. I pulled up a few beetroots and cut all the courgettes. When freshly picked like this, it is possible to expect these vegetables to last at least until the end of the first week away. I added these last pickings to my previously harvested onions, garlic and 3 different variety of potatoes. Three varieties of potatoes may sound excessive, but when you are away for 3 weeks it is nice to be able to cook potatoes in different ways and each variety is particularly suitable for certain cooking techniques.

Our holiday destination was our little cottage on the north coast of Scotland. It is a very basic affair with a tiny galley kitchen but the kitchen is well stocked with utensils and vessels. It has an old but spacious fridge, with a dodgy door that has to be held shut with a bungy cord. It also has an electric cooker with an oven and 3 working hob rings. Work surface is almost non-existent but it is surprising what you can cook when you put your mind to it. I could, of course, live on ready-meals for a week, simply reheating them in the microwave that’s so old it doesn’t even have a rotating turntable and probably microwaves the kitchen as much as it does the food inside. But I’m a foodie at heart and part of being on holiday is enjoying lovely evening meals. I’m happy to cook as long as Steve does the washing up. And he’s happy to do the washing up as long as he’s well fed!

When on holiday we tend to choose luxury items that we wouldn’t normally eat every day so our first meal was roast duck, roasted Sharpe’s Express potatoes, carrots, tiny broad beans and peas. If cooking duck at home I would have strolled into the front garden and grabbed a bundle of fresh sage then stuffed the cavity with sage and onion. In the absence of fresh sage I decided to concoct a stuffing from the flavours I did have to hand. I finely chopped up a red onion, a clove of garlic, some root ginger, an inch of celery, a small yellow courgette, a mushroom and a rasher of bacon. This I stirfried for a few minutes in some olive oil then put it in a bowl with breadcrumbs made from two slices of wholemeal bread. I squeezed it together before stuffing the crop and the cavity with the mixture before roasting the duck. And very tasty the stuffing proved to be.

The next day we headed west around the coast. It was a beautiful sunny day and as we drove home later that evening I was struck by the picturesque beauty of the Kyle of Tongue in bright sunshine. We pulled off the road to take a photo and to my surprise there was a huge fennel bush growing at the edge of the layby. I guess not everyone would recognise a fennel bush when they see one, but for a kitchen gardener it was an easy identification. As megrin sole was on the menu for that night’s dinner I took the liberty of gathering a few sprigs of the fennel and back at the cottage I grilled the fish on a bed of fresh fennel.

The next day was another epic roast meal but this time it was a beautiful Scottish leg of lamb. Again, at home, a trip to the herb garden would be in order to pick a sprig of rosemary and then I would stab the leg all over, pushing in a slice of garlic and a piece of rosemary into each slit. With no rosemary to hand I sent Steve out to retrieve some of the wild thyme I could see growing outside the kitchen window. As usual I inserted garlic into every slit but this time a piece of thyme went in with it. Then I seasoned it all over with salt and pepper before spreading a good dollop of mustard all over it. This was accompanied by Kestrel roast potatoes, the last of the peas, carrots and some roasted yellow courgette. I had never roasted courgettes before but it was simple to do. Firstly I cut the courgette into chunks then tossed them in a mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper and dried mixed herbs. I then placed them carefully in the roasting tin with the potatoes, skin side down, and cooked them for the last 20 minutes of the roasting time. They were beautifully sweet with a lovely herby flavour.

After that, the next meal was a little simpler. Boiled gammon and baked potatoes. It still took an hour to cook but an hour when I could get on with other things. The potatoes, by the way, were overgrown Charlotte potatoes. Usually known for their boiling ability, I discovered last year that when left in the ground too long and grown too large, they actually make brilliant baked potatoes with lovely crispy skin. The secret to a crispy skin on a baked potato is to rub it with oil and a little salt before baking. Then to finish the meal, a few salad items such as tomatoes, cucumber, celery and some homegrown beetroot, cooked that morning after breakfast.

So for the first week at least, we managed to eat homegrown vegetables and enjoy the lovely flavours of the season.

The Broad Bean Harvest

We're having a lovely broad bean harvest this year and I plan to make the most of them. I sowed 5 different varieties in the spring and kept them under plastic cloche tunnels until the heatwave in April when the first flowers started to appear. Obviously, the pollinating insects wouldn't be able to do their jobs if the flowers were kept under plastic.

When there were just a few remaining flowers and most of the beans had formed I went round and nipped off the top bunch of leaves from every plant. I don't know how or why but doing this significantly reduces the blackfly infestation. If you leave it too late and blackfly have already arrived by the time you do it then it doesn't work and if you don't do it at all then you can expect blackflies to inundate your broad beans, starting at the top and eventually swamping the bean pods themselves. With the top nipping done at the correct point this year we have a lovely healthy looking crop.

When growing lots of plants, as were are, it is worth eating the beans from the earliest possible point when the beans inside are still tiny. Some people actually eat the bean pods before the beans have begun to form but I'm not a fan of furry food! It seems a bit wasteful at first to split open the large pods to extract tiny beans that in no way attempt to fill their cosy sleeping bag. But, with steady eating from this stage you will still end up having beans on the plants that become old and unpleasant to eat.

Broad beans are nicest to eat when they are young and become increasingly less pleasant the older they get. When young they should pop out of their pods with their little green hats still with them. As they get older the hat begins to turn yellow and eventually the beans come out without their hats, leaving a black scar on the bean. At this point it is best to cook the beans then squeeze the inner bean out of the now tough outer skin. This is another fiddly stage in the preparation so it is obviously easier to avoid this by eating them before they reach this stage. Personally, when they reach this point I usually cook them up and turn them into pate or houmous (see archives for the recipes).

By this weekend the beans had grown quite large but they still had their little green hats and were pleasant to eat. It struck me that now would be the perfect time to freeze some beans for the winter months - rather than leaving it until they go past their best. So I set about harvesting half of what was left on the plants and came home with a bulging carrier bag full. These I podded until I had a huge bowlful of the things. Then I got a big pan of boiling water going and blanched the lot. Then I plunged them into icy water to cool them quickly then dried them roughly and lay them out on trays to freeze. The next morning I rubbed them off the trays and dropped them into freezer bags as handy individually frozen beans. It was very satisfying to put 3 bags of broad beans into the freezer for the winter.

The remaining beans on the plants are continuing to feed us and of course are continuing to mature. We will eat them fresh until they become tough then I shall make & freeze my pate and houmous for Steve's sandwiches throughout the year. What a handy bean the broad bean is.

I feel a cheesecake coming on

Often when I'm baking it is one of my own recipe books that I refer to. I love creating and writing down new recipes. It is lovely to be able to share my kitchen creativity with others through my books but it is also really handy to have them to refer back to myself. Blogging is another useful way to make sure I don't forget my recipes.

Earlier this week I decided to turned the latest harvest of strawberries into a strawberry swirl cheesecake. Regular readers of my blog will know that I created this for the first time last year at the request of my eldest daughter. Having blogged about it back then I knew that now I need only delve into the archives of my blog to find the recipe again this year. This I did and printed it out for reference in the kitchen.

As usual, just as I got started my eldest daughter sprung into the kitchen to see if I required any help. I'm never one to turn down help so she found her apron and washed her hands. Then she spotted the recipe on a piece of paper and asked why it was only on paper and not in one of my recipe books. I pointed out that I'm always coming up with new recipes and the new ones aren't in recipe books yet. "Well," she said, "in that case, you need to write a cheesecake recipe book."

That night as I lay in bed, drifting off to sleep I started thinking about cheesecakes. Well, there are worse things to think about as you fall asleep. By the morning I had decided that a cheesecake mini recipe booklet would make a useful addition to my mini recipe book range but I am going to need more recipes. So what's seasonal, tasty and not something I have already done?

By the time I went to bed again the next night I had come to conclusion that an elderflower cheesecake was a strong possibility. And by the end of the next day I had elderflowers infusing in whipping cream in the fridge. Later, the idea of including gooseberries in the recipe too occurred to me so that night my daughter and I made gooseberry and elderflower cheesecake.

I couldn't wait to try it so had a sneaky slice after my lunch the next day. Straight after school my daughter asked to try it and she quickly gave it her seal of approval and informed me it was good enough to go into my cheesecake recipe book. That's a long term project but here's the gooseberry and elderflower cheesecake recipe in the meantime. By the way, if you have a cheesecake recipe that you think would make a good addition to my recipe book, please get in touch.

Gooseberry & Elderflower Cheesecake

Base:

6 oz crushed digestive biscuits

2 oz melted butter

Filling:

5 fl oz whipping cream

5 elderflower heads

4 oz gooseberries

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

3 oz caster sugar

1 egg

7 oz soft cheese

Snip the flower heads off the stalks and place the flowers into a container with the whipping cream. Place a lid on it then place it in the fridge overnight to infuse.

To make the base: Put the biscuits in a bag and crush them with the end of a rolling pin until finely crushed. Melt the butter and mix it with the biscuit crumbs. Press the mix firmly into the bottom of a 20cm flan dish and chill for about 1 hour.

To make the filling: Preheat oven to 180 °C, gas mark 4. Place the gooseberries in a small saucepan with a couple of tablespoons of water and the granulated sugar then cook for about 10 minutes until the fruit is soft. Set aside to cool. Cream together the cheese and the caster sugar until light and fluffy. Next, strain the cream through a sieve, squeezing the flowers to extract as much cream as possible - you should have approximately 4 fl oz of cream. Discard the elderflowers. Add the egg and cream to the cheese mix and whisk with an electric whisk until thick. Dollop the creamy filling onto the biscuit base and spread out evenly. Place a sieve over a bowl and pour the gooseberries through the sieve, crushing the fruit with a spoon to leave behind just the skin and seeds. Spoon a tablespoon of the gooseberry sauce onto the cream mixture then use a chopstick or skewer to carefully swirl the sauce through the cream mixture. Put the remaining gooseberry sauce into the refrigerator until serving. Place the cheesecake in the oven and bake for 20 minutes then turn out the oven and leave it in the oven for another 10 minutes. After that open the oven door and leave the cheesecake inside to continue its slow cooling so that it doesn't crack. Once cool, refrigerate the cheesecake to chill before serving. Serve each slice of cheesecake with a serving of gooseberry sauce.