Cooking recipe books

Foraging diaries # 12  /  Jam diaries # 9:  Crab apples . Fruit butters are intensely flavoured fruit purees cooked until they are very concentrated. ( The Preserving Book , Lynda Brown) Fruit butters are soft, spreadable and delicious on bread or toast. ( Forgotten skills of cooking , Darina Allen) Last year I made Darina Allen's apple butter. I initially turned my nose at it's unusual ingredients of cloves and coriander seeds but then decided to try anyway and I was very pleasantly surprised with the delicious outcome. This year I also decided to make Lynda Brown's apple butter, which has allspice and cinnamon instead. I'll leave below both recipes because I think both are good. However, I must admit that Darina's is my favourite. APPLE BUTTER (DARINA ALLEN) Serves: 630g. Ingredients: 500g apples, cored and peeled juice of ½ lemon juice of ½ orange ½ tsp ground cloves ¼ tsp ground coriander seeds 250g granulated sugar Method: Roughly chop the apples and simmer t...

This year, for the first time, I've grow aubergines. I wasn't expecting aubergine plants to be so easy to grow. I didn't know that, left in the plant, aubergines grow to gigantic sizes. I am so pleased! I picked an aubergine weighing 500g. Yes, half a kilo! What could I do with it? I remembered moussaka has aubergines. I've had moussaka before but I have never cooked one. So I went for it! No moussaka recipe in my books. Online I wasn't happy with a single recipe so I decided to do a mix with: Wikipedia's description of a traditional Greek moussaka recipe - 3 layers: aubergine, lamb mince and white sauce. The Hairy Bikers' moussaka recipe. Akis Petretzikis authentic Greek moussaka recipe. The recipe has many steps and calls for a lot of washing up but the end result was delicious. The only thing I would change is the amount of aubergine. I think that a thicker layer of aubergine would highlight better the taste of aubergine in the dish. So I have doubled the...

I decided to make rose water. Why? Why not? I had gathered rose petals over the Summer and dried them in a low heat oven for a few minutes. Now I wanted to do something with them.  I had no recipes with rose water in my recipe books so I scoured the internet looking for one. I found this recipe at the BBC Food website and it's from Nadiya Hussein, one of the winners of The Great British Bake Off. First things first, I made the rose water, recipe from Wellness Mama website: Simmer ¼ cup of dried rose petals in 1½ cups of water until the colour of the rose petals has faded, about 5-10 min. Leave the lid on and cool completely. Strain the water through a sieve into a clean jar. Store in the fridge for several weeks or on the counter for up to 1 week. Rose water is not pink. Yes, mine is very dark... Rose water is supposed to be fragrant. Mine has a very very very fain t smell of rose. Rose water is supposed to have a taste of rose. Mine doesn't. Ok, this might not have been a goo...

When I was younger, me and my mom often visited a great-aunt for tea. Our aunt was extremely fond of yogurt cake, so much so it was always that cake she served with tea. Yogurt cake, unlike traditional cake, is made with oil. The oil gives it a fluffy and soft texture and it keeps it fresher for longer. Yes, it also has yogurt. I could no longer remember the exact taste of it as it had been a good 20 years since the last time I had it. However, I did remember clearly that this cake matches divinely with cheese. That's it! Cheese!  As I ate the first mouthful of cake, my memories came back. It may be a simple cake but it has a wonderful flavour on it's own. It also goes well with jam but cheese is, without a doubt, THE best match. The measurements for this cake are traditionally made with the yogurt pot. A 125g plain yogurt pot is used to measure all ingredients. Alas, at home we make our own yogurt so we do not have yogurt pots. Instead, I used a ½ cup as it looked like a simi...