Blackberry and apple crumble

The first blackberries of the season are ripening well, and my favourite picking patches are heavy with fruit, all swelled to massive proportions by the heavy rain we've been experiencing. Our haul was about 2kg, enough for a crumble, with plenty left for the freezer.

Blackberries are probably the most accessible of wild food - plentiful, easy to identify and delicious. There can't be many people who haven't picked and eaten wild blackberries. It makes you wonder who buys those little pre-packaged punnets in the supermarket?

So, blackberry and apple crumble it is then. It's an easy dish, more like a simple assembly job than real cooking. I don't use any particular recipe.

Crumble:

150g plain flour
100g butter
Sugar, preferably demerara, a couple of tablespoons

Filling:

Blackberries, about 400g or so, picked over and washed
Apples, peeled and sliced - I use a fairly sweet eating apple from our allotment, but Braeburns or Coxes are good
Demerara sugar to taste

Blitz all the crumble ingredients together in a food processor until they resemble breadcrumbs. You might add a bit of cinnamon, if you want, or maybe some oats for a crunchier finish.

Mix the apples, blackberries and sugar together in a baking dish. Taste a piece of apple and a blackberry and add more sugar if needed - this is largely dependent on the sweetness of the fruit.

Tip the crumble over the fruit and smooth. Bake in a medium oven, about 175c for about 35 minutes. Done. The filling will be volcanically hot, so let it rest for five minutes before eating. Also, this is excellent eaten cold whilst stood in front of the fridge with the door open.

Some people pre-cook the apples and blackberries together so that the apples start dissolving into the blackberries. This is fine, but I prefer the way that the apples retain their shape and a little bit of bite when cooked undisturbed from raw.

Cooking this with frozen blackberries is OK, and makes an excellent pie, but the crumble you make on the evening that you pick the blackberries is the undisputed king of puddings. The very best of the year.

Harry Ramsden's

We went to Harry Ramsden's in Guiseley, Leeds this weekend. Fish and chips on a Sunday lunchtime has turned into an occasional habit, which is fine with me. At around midday on a Sunday, somebody will tentatively ask what we're going to have for lunch, knowing that the others have already decided exactly what they want and where they want to get it from.

It's never the kids who ask.

Harry Ramsden's is the original super-fish and chip shop as far as my family is concerned. There are other pretenders to this crown, and there always have been, but only Bryan's in Headingley comes anywhere close. I've been going to Harry's since I was a child, when fish knives were exotic, unusual and unfathomable and sliced bread, mixed white and brown, served in a pile, always arrived seemingly buttered on both sides. We saw this as nothing short of amazing. You had to queue to get a table, so the place must have been good.

Harry Ramsden's restaurant, inspired by the Ritz, was what passed as glamorous to my siblings and I. Remember that this was Yorkshire in the late seventies and eighties.

Glamour hadn't been invented yet.

Talk of somewhere like Leeds becoming the Knightsbridge of the North would have been met with derision. Bread buttered on both sides and funny shaped knives were the height of sophistication to us kids.

Harry's trades heavily on it's heritage, having first opened in 1928 in a hut in the corner of the car park of the massive Guiseley restaurant. From these beginnings have grown a fish and chip empire, if you can actually have a fish and chip empire, that spans the country. Well, mainly the country's seaside resorts/pensioner havens. The company's history is retold everywhere, and any post about Harry Ramsden's has to include the fact that on the enterprise's 21st anniversary in 1952, 10,000 portions of fish and chips were sold. You're reminded of this on the side of every single take away carton.

The fish of choice in Yorkshire and at Harry's is haddock, although cod is available, but presumably not for much longer given it's endangered status. Harry's also serve pollack for their 'special' presumably because no cod or haddock can produce a suitably large fillet any more.

Our fish and chips were excellent this time. I say 'this time' because other times the food has been terrible - overcooked chips, scrappy and crunchy, served by people who really didn't want to be serving anybody anything at all. This time, we ate excellent chips straight from the fryer, crisp but fluffy, made from quality potatoes. The fish was a chunky piece of haddock, with delicate flakes cooked well. Crisp batter, not too thick and no skin, as is traditional in Yorkshire.

Perfect fish and chips.

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The perfect job

Sourdough part III

There is life! I spotted a few gentle bubbles in my slightly pink sourdough starter yesterday, after six days of worried observation and occasional stirring. According to the recipe, we've still got to wait for another week before moving into an arduous fortnight of twice daily feeding which may actually bankrupt me given the huge amount of organic flour involved.

I dared to taste the starter tonight, against my better judgment. This is an experiment that I won't be repeating. It was foul. Unpleasant looking, with a faintly off-putting smell, it tasted sour and - gasp - just a little bit fizzy. Yeast!

North Indian curry

An unusual curry tonight. Simple, but very good.

The recipe is from Amjun Anand's Indian Food Made Easy. I bought this to make up the numbers on a book order to get free delivery, which isn't really the most auspicious start. So, with low expectations and a lack of inspiration on a wet Wednesday evening with nothing in the fridge, and only some frozen fish in the freezer, I settled on a plan, which unlike most of my so-called 'plans' actually turned out quite well.

North Indian curry is a 'full-flavoured, tangy and spicy dish - a curry made for Indians'. Well, I'm not Indian, but I've had a few curries in my time, so maybe I qualify? Please?

The curry is straightforward, but doesn't include any onions (had to re-read the recipe a couple of times to make sure. Curry? No onions? A scandal!). A basic masala of garlic, ginger, cumin, pepper, mustard seeds and coriander acts as a base for half a kilo or so of white fish (coley in this case, sustainable, of course..), fenugreek, chilli and turmeric. The sauce is completed with a can of tomatoes.

The finished dish was light but quite gutsy and complex, with strong flavours that didn't overpower - an excellent curry. With some pilau rice, cooked with cardamom, cloves, pepper and cinnamon, this was 20 easy minutes of cooking and a first class result.

TV tie-in cook books like this normally make me run a mile, but this is an excellent book with some interesting and easy recipes. More, please.

A completely unseasonal dinner

It's the middle of August, and it hasn't stopped raining for weeks. No roofer will come near my leaking skylight.

Against this backdrop, a dinner of brisket and root vegetables doesn't seem too out of place, so I threw together a mediocre piece of brisket from the forgotten depths of the freezer with carrots, onions and mushrooms in some vegetable stock with a bit of thyme and a couple of bay leaves.

Nothing fancy, nothing complicated, no particular recipe involved. And yet, as is customary, I still manage to foul it up by neglecting to add flour to the vegetables to thicken the stock. This happens every single time.

This time, I recovered well, sneaking some flour in in the form of a flour/stock paste. With some vigorous stirring, it nearly all dissolved. Nobody noticed.

Sourdough part II

Quick update on the sourdough starter...not good. Twenty-four hours in, the flour and water has separated a bit, leaving some rank looking water floating on the top.

I've stirred it all up again. Needs more time and patience.

Mutton tagine

My regular Asian supermarket had a huge pile of chopped mutton shoulder, displayed in that haphazard way characteristic of those sort of places, so I took a kilo without really knowing what to do with it.

I vaguely remembered Gordon Ramsey banging on about mutton (underrated, hardly used, etc) and doing something North African with it, which is how I chanced on his spicy tagine recipe.

The meat was on the bone, cut into small serving chunks. A bit darker than normal lamb, and earthier and gamier, it cooks just like old lamb, which is obviously what it is. For about £4/kilo, it's a bargain.

The tagine is based on a trio of onion, garlic and ginger, spiced with ras el-hanout and finished with honey and apricots. The ras el-hanout is the real engine room of this dish, providing much of its character and depth. Half an hour assembly and a couple of hours gentle bubbling resulted in a fragrant casserole of tender meat and spicy sauce. The on-the-bone nature of the meat helped the sauce a great deal. If anything, this was a little too spicy, so I'll go easier on the seasoning next time, and increase the amount of lemon juice.

With some couscous, a brilliant meal and an easy recipe.

Saltaire Farmer's Market

Saltaire Farmer's Market (third Saturday of the month) never fails to disappoint.

Today, there were eight stalls stretched across a whole car park. That's a lot of empty tarmac. One cheese stall, a couple of meat stalls, with the rest made up with cake and biscuit stalls. No soup, no pies, not even any fruit and veg. Definitely no roast pork sandwiches.

When it was launched a couple of years ago, the market was packed, with plenty of stalls (maybe well over twenty) selling a wide range of produce, but the range and quantity of sellers has dwindled over the years, along with the enthusiasm of the locals, it seems. There is a small group helping to advertise and support the market, led by Magic Number Three, but it's probably not enough to keep it going in the long term. I can't imagine that many stallholders will make a profit today, based on the volume of people we saw there this morning.

Sourdough starter

I've tried a few times to make sourdough bread, with a little success, but mostly failure. Previous results were patchy, resulting in a very heavy bread lacking the big, yeasty holes characteristic of a good sourdough loaf. Either that, or the starter never really got off the ground, turning into a grey, foul sludge.

My previous starters have consisted of flour, water and yeasts 'caught' from the air - the classical way to start a sourdough is to allow airborne yeasts to colonise a flour and water mixture, then feed them up into a frothing mass. Maybe there just isn't enough yeast around here.

This time I'm taking a different approach, giving the starter a slight nudge in the right direction. To the basic organic flour and water mix, I've added a muslin bag containing a bunch of red grapes, which are rich in the right types of yeast and bacteria. The recipe is from Sam and Sam Clark's excellent Moro cookbook, so I'm expecting a sourdough with a hint of Spain....even the grapes are Spanish, although this is more down to Asda's supply chain and good fortune than any of my planning.

The starter looks a bit nervous at the moment. It will be left for two weeks, before the next feeding stage.