Delia's mincemeat

I've already got carried away with Christmas this year. I've already bought the snowman shaped biscuit cutters to make the biscuits that will decorate the tree and have made two massive jars of mincemeat and three Christmas cakes; one for the boyfriend, one for me and one to give away as a present although I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep up the pretence that I'm going to give it away. I used this recipe last year and was pleased enough with the results to make it again this year!

Using these fancy jars makes for an awesome Christmas present. Nanna will be very impressed.

Ingredients
450g Bramley apples diced into small pieces
225g shredded suet
350g raisins
225g sultanas
225g currants
225g whole mixed candied peel, chopped into small pieces
350g soft dark brown sugar
Grated zest and juice of 2 oranges and 2 lemons
50g almonds cut into slivers
4 tsps ground mixed spice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
6 tbsps brandy

Method
Combine and thoroughly mix all ingredients except the brandy. Cover and leave overnight. The next day pre-heat oven to gas mark 1/4 (yes, a quarter) and place the mixing bowl, covered with foil into the pre-heated oven for three hours. Remove from oven and stir occasionally until the fat coagulates. Now stir in the brandy and spoon the mixture into sterilised jars.

And to sterilise your jars, wash them in warm soapy water, dry and place them in a medium oven for 5 minutes or until completely dry.

Breadmaker bread recipe

I know it might seem silly giving a recipe for something which you don't actually make but breadmakers can be surprisingly difficult to get right.

In the past, I had been following the recipes from my breadmaker's manual and was quite content to pretend to be pleased with its results. Indeed, I would chew disappointingly on my heartburn-inducing stodge happy to bypass my taste buds in favour of the pleasure of eating something 'homemade'. The novelty was obviously quick to wear off.

I thought I'd give it another chance and use a recipe not featured in the manual. Since then I have been making bread practically every day for the last week. I've even taken it out of permanent hibernation from under the sink and have put it pride of place next to the microwave. That's a good thing - my microwave is amazing.


Gone are the days of bland, indigestible stodge. Say "Bonjour" to French crusty!

Ingredients
350ml water
1 tbsp skimmed milk powder
25g butter
540g strong white flour
1 and 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp light brown sugar
1 sachet dried fast-action yeast

Method...if you want to call it that
Place ingredients in breadmaker in order listed and use basic small setting. Or if you breadmaker is super fancy like mine, then use French setting.

Homous

My friend once told me that on the one and only occasion she could be bothered to make homous she discovered that it "didn't actually require as much oil as you might think." She said that as long as your put enough garlic and lemon juice in it you could pretty much get away with making it oil free. This inevitably sent my mind into homous overdrive. Imagine eating as much homous as you wanted! Because obviously 'oil free = fat free', and 'fat free = being able to stuff your face silly with it.'

The opportunity to make it arose when cleaning out my cupboard, I found a bag of dried chickpeas which on every previous occasion I had pulled out to cook, I would frustratingly shove it back in the cupboard because I would realise that I had absolutely no idea what to do with them. But this time was different. This time I had the motivation of fat-free homous at the back of my mind.

So how to cook them? Well, Nigella writes that you should soak them in water overnight with a tsp of baking powder and bicarb, drain and the next day, immerse them in water and put them on the stove with the lid on at a simmering heat for up to three hours. Nigella even mentions how the 'nutty' smell of the chickpeas will spread through the whole house and how enjoyable it will be for you. Nigella must have simply been boiling some nuts that day because my house ended up smelling of dead cat fur. And that was despite the bay leaves I had put in for extra flavour.

So when you're ready, blitz together two cups of the cooked and cooled chickpeas, three tbsps of tahini, the juice of one lemon, four cloves of garlic, a tsp of cumin and then, with the food processor still on, pour hot water into the funnel a little bit at a time until you get the homousy consistency you're after. And I know we're after a low-fat homous but just for authenticities sake, stir through a tablespoon of olive oil.

If you're a sucker for sun-dried tomatoes then add five to the food processor. For those who like olives in their homous sandwiches but couldn't take any more embarrassing olive-falling-out-of sandwich-and-on-to-lap moments, then simply blitz a handful into the mixture. If you use kalamata olives, it makes it go purple!

Halloween cupcakes

I guess it's a bit late to be making a post about anything Halloween related. Supermarket stackers are no doubt already pulling all the Halloween confectionery from the shelves. Somewhere out there, hardcore Halloween enthusiasts are starting to realise that it won't be 31st October again for a whole year and asking themselves "Do I have enough energy to drag myself down to Sainsbury's to check out the half price chocolate witches and reduced vampire make-up which would really come in handy for fancy dress parties?".

I made these ones with a friend. At first orange seemed like a great idea because it meant we could make pumpkin faced cupcakes which worked for the one at the bottom in the middle but then confused us when we wanted to do anything that wasn't orange which is why every other one looks a bit naff unless you try to imagine another colour in the background.

To make the orange Royal Icing simply whisk an egg white for about 20 seconds until a little bit frothy. To get enough to cover about a dozen cakes, just use about a third of the egg white and then slowly keep adding sieved icing sugar with a couple of drops of red and yellow food colouring. When it gets firm enough to roll into a ball, dust some icing sugar on a clean surface and roll out. I used a cup to cut out the circles to go on top and some ready made tubes of 'writing icing' for drawing. Oh and I heated up about 2 tbsps of apricot jam with a tbsp of water to make a glaze which was then painted on the cakes to enable the icing to stick.

Chanelle has a tantrum on Ready Steady Cook

It's all too easy to bitch about this princess but seeing as she had never crossed over into the food/restaurant territory, I never had the means to warrant a good old Chanelle rant.

So imagine my joy when I saw her on Friday's edition of Ready Steady Cook!



What confuses me about this video is the number of opportunities Brian Turner has to head-butt Chanelle but turns them down. That's fair enough Brian. After all it's a family show and it's shown before the watershed but that really doesn't explain why you had to hug her instead. We'd rather be watching Deal or No Deal.

Slump in Italian wine sales

"Wine could make a good antibacterial mouth wash to fight tooth decay and a sore throat, according to Italian researchers." says The Telegraph.


Does that mean we can expect next weeks news to report that British researchers will recommend that you should gargle with cider?

The Anti-Borough Market

Have you had it up to your nostrils with trendy farmers markets? Are you sick of pretending that you like smelly French cheese? Do you want to spend your Saturday mornings anywhere BUT browsing organic foods you've never heard of surrounded by middle-class, half-arsed hippies? If the answer to any of these is 'yes' you may want to pay a visit to one of London's lesser known markets; Lewisham Market.


To be honest, I don't really mind Lewisham. I mean, it looks OK from the window when you pass through it on the train. That is until the day you pluck up the courage to get off the train and see the local shops and suddenly recall all the times you've heard bad things on the news about locals getting shot. Then comes the day when you finally visit the market on the weekend. It's then. That first visit to the market when you add up everything and start to realise why it has such an undesirable reputation. It is, in a nutshell, rough. But boy oh boy, is the fruit cheap!


Take a look at this lot for example. A massive bag of grapes, an equally stuffed bag of bananas, a box of mangoes, fourteen plums and two pineapples. All for £5!

Is it organic? No! Is it fair trade? Not likely! Is it at least fresh and of good quality? Hardly ever!


Look at those apples. OK, so they're quite pale compared to the ones from Borough Market (on the right) but then again, you're paying a pound for the whole bowl. So who cares if they've been on the pavement? I certainly don't!


Box of mangoes with strange black spots for £1? Yes please! And to think you could have bought the 'disease-free' variety in Borough Market for double!


And who needs all those fancy pastries and muffins when there's a perfectly good doughnut stand? They are fresh after all! I didn't see that man making that really delicious muffin before my eyes. Who knows where it could have come from?


We'll ignore that for now....


And don't worry if you couldn't find what you wanted at the market - Iceland will probably have it.