Leaves of russet fall,
Rustle and crackle underfoot.
Frost shimmers on cars,
Yes, it’s autumn once more!

Excuse my feeble attempts at poetry, I don’t know what came over me. The fact remains, however, that it is autumn. The days are short, the air is crisp and it’s definitely time to be in the kitchen baking.

In an attempt to keep fat levels down and moisture levels up, I’ve replaced half of the vegetable oil of a normal muffin recipe with prune puree. All you need to do is simmer 50g of prunes in a little water until soft, drain (reserving liquor) and puree. You should end up with a soft, sticky puree of a slightly thicker consistency than treacle. Thin if necessary with the reserved liquor.

Don’t worry if you’re not a prune lover. I promise that you can’t taste the prunes! They just give the muffins some extra help in the dark and sticky department. And boy, do they end up dark and sticky! Even a couple of days later the muffins are still moist all the way through, deliciously sticky on top and the flavour just keeps improving. Frankly, I’m amazed.

I reckon that these muffins would be even more special with a little drizzle of lemon glace icing on top. And of course, you could serve them warm as dessert with some apple of pear compote and a scoop of gently melting vanilla ice-cream….

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Jambalaya… it’s such a happy sounding word. Even better, it’s a happy taste, too. Full of joie de vivre.

Each fragrant, spicy-sweet mouthful conjures up daydreams of sitting in a bustling New Orleans diner. The sort of place where there’s no talking, just the clink of cutlery on plates and a susurrus of approval. My daydreams usually see me waddling off on further epicurean adventures… perhaps towards a Banana Foster’s Bread Pudding. One day I’ll eat and drink my way down Bourbon Street….

In case you were wondering, the difference between a Cajun and a Creole jambalaya is simply that a Creole one contains tomatoes. Please, however, don’t ask me to explain the nuances describing the differences between Creole and Cajun cooking overall. I get rather lost.

This isn’t a quick after-work dinner, but on the other hand, it won’t take you all day either. Regardless of how long it takes, or how tired you are when you start cooking, this jambalaya is absolutely worth the wait.

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I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with dried sage, let alone fresh, which is pretty shocking when you consider how much sage and onion stuffing I’ve scoffed in my time. I picked up some in Sainsbury’s earlier this week with the thought of making a roasted squash recipe I spotted in last month’s Good Food Magazine and was surprised at how wrinkled, grey-green and… fuzzy the leaves were. I think I had expected it to look somewhat like fresh bay leaves–a vibrant green, glossy, and inviting. This stuff reminded me of caterpillars, to be honest. If it wasn’t for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Kalyn herself this week, I probably would have omitted the sage entirely.

According to Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food, sage is part of the mint family. Looking more closely at the leaves, I can see the resemblance, although sage is definitely more fuzzy/hairy than any mints I’ve encountered so far. I nibbled on a raw leaf and it tasted a bit peppery and, well, grassy.

I have to admit that sage is playing more of a supporting role in this recipe than parading around in the limelight like a Hollywood starlet. The real stars are the vegetables. The butternut squash goes all squishy and incredibly sweet as do the tomatoes. I usually roast cherry tomatoes for far longer than five minutes until they’ve collapsed in on themselves and are incredibly sticky, but I think that would have been too much in combination with the sweetness of the squash. The tomatoes were just soft and only beginning to caramelise so they still had a tiny bit of acidity. Perfect. The chorizo did burn a little as I cut it very small in an effort to spread its flavour over all the veg, but I don’t think it suffered for it. I quite liked the occasional bit of crunch amidst the meltingly soft squash, squidgy tomatoes and just-tender pasta. The sage helped to cut through the fattiness off the chorizo, I think, but I couldn’t honestly pick out the flavour, even with some freshly shredded leaves sprinkled over. I guess I need to cook with it a bit more?

Now that we’ve got our own house I’m trying to figure out where best to site a herb garden and of course what to grow. Perhaps next to the plum tree? There must be plenty of light there. I think I could be persuaded to squeeze in a sage bush somewhere….

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I love cheesecake and I love lemon curd.

Using the magic of culinary mathematics, that means that I also love… lemon curd cheesecake! If you squint ever so slightly you can see the lemon curd at the bottom of the cheesecake pictured above–I forgot to have my curd at room temperature before starting to bake, so it dropped straight through the batter. Sitting pretty on the top of a cheesecake, or lurking around the bottom… it still tastes awesome!

As with all low-fat cheesecakes, making it is a bit of a production, but the results make it utterly worthwhile. To me, this cheesecake tastes like summer. Zesty lemon, smooth and creamy cheesecake–what could be better at this time of year?

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I remember the huge chimichangas that TGI Friday’s used to serve… piled high with fresh guacamole, salsa, delicious sour cream and dirty rice. Mmmm.

Alas, delicious as this dish was, it was completely non-diet friendly, so I was delighted to find a recipe for skinny chimichangas in my copy of Weight Watchers Take Out Tonight! when it arrived last year. The main problem with chimichangas is the grease. They’re essentially deep-fried burritos and regardless of all the insistence on the part of people who own deep-fat fryers, they do come out greasy. So, the first major change with this recipe is that the chimis are baked after being sprayed with some low-fat cooking spray. The second problem–although, is this really a problem?–is the large amount of cheese used in the filling. Alas, this does mean both slashing the amount of cheese and the fat content. Much woe. Still, some reduced-fat cheese is actually okay.

These chimis are pretty damn good–sure they don’t have the same delicious crunch that deep-frying gives, but there’s still crunch and the filling is meaty, spicy, hot and deliciously cheesy. They’re so good that I find myself wondering why I don’t make these every week!

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I don’t just eat stew for comfort in the depths of winter, I eat it for pleasure, and the best stew imaginable in my opinion is stifado. It boasts big meaty flavours, a sweet and subtly spiced sauce, and almost best of all… meltingly soft shallots or baby onions which have absorbed all the flavours. Delicious!

Stifado is a traditional Greek stew which, if you’re being pedantic, should be made with hare. I don’t have the heart to serve hare to Dave, and neither do I have a source for it, so I use beef which is perfectly lovely in its own right.

Don’t be tempted to make this more ‘gourmet’ by substituting fresh oregano for the dried; they’re vastly different beasts. Dried oregano has a much more pungent and powerful flavour and stands up better to long-cooking in a stew. Plus, it’s the authentic ingredient, so don’t fiddle with it!

I usually serve the stifado with some roasted-garlic mashed potatoes, but as I had some little Charlotte potatoes in the fridge I decided to use those up instead. Boiled is too boring–unless we’re talking Jersey Royals–so I chopped them up and roasted them with some rosemary and garlic. Sure, they didn’t soak up the sauce like mash would have done, but their crunch went really well with the velvety stew. You could, of course, go for a bit of Mediterranean fusion and serve the stifado over soft polenta….

Delicious!

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Upside-down cakes are culinary classics; pineapple upside-down cake is certain to feature in almost every novice cook’s early attempts at cooking as it’s pretty much foolproof and damn tasty to boot. I certainly remember making one in home economics class in high school, complete with lurid red glace cherries.

These baby cakes are a variation on the theme and are low fat, bursting with flavour, and very quick to prepare. Perfect for busy mums. I halved the recipe as I’m still dieting and too many cakes lying around the house are a sure-fire recipe for disaster at the scales. The original recipe was pretty straightforward, so I didn’t bother fiddling with any of the quantities. As far as I can tell, it worked perfectly.

If you don’t fancy apricots you could of course vary the fruit used. A variation on a variation–cute. Pineapple is the obvious option, but a slice of peach and a couple of juicy raspberries would be divine.

I’ll definitely be making these cakes again; after one bite I was regretting only making six and by the time I’d finished the first one I was eyeing the other five speculatively. Alas, Dave would have noticed if all the cakes vanished and Lucas isn’t old enough to become a glutton’s scapegoat yet. Ah well, I have four of these lovely, lovely cakes sitting in the kitchen, just waiting to find a home in my tummy. Oh well, that’s breakfast sorted then….

But I digress. The apricots turned out meltingly soft and caramelised and the cake which tenderly blankets them is soft, sweet and chewy in places. While they were cooking I could only smell the vanilla, but it’s very much a background flavvour in the finished product with almonds taking centre stage alongside the apricots.

How long till breakfast?

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Red pepper pesto? Heresy, I hear you cry! Well… not really. Pesto simply means a pounded sauce, or in these modern times–blitzed in the food processor. Sure, the classic Ligurian sauce contains basil and pine nuts, but you can legitimately call any number of variations pesto.

I’m really proud of myself for finally knocking pesto off my very long Things to Make list. I feel rather silly for having taken so many years to make it, to be honest, but it has (or rather, had) a weird intimidation factor for me. No longer! What could be easier than tossing a couple of peppers in the oven, peeling them, then throwing them in a food processor with some other goodies for a few seconds? Well, opening a jar, but work with me here!

Roasting peppers can turn even the most appallingly bad peppers into something quite delicious. I always make a point of buying the ugly and unloved peppers as they tend to have the best flavour and that really paid off today. I tried roasting one on the gas burner but quickly abandoned that idea after a couple of glowing embers flew off the underside of the pepper. With visions of the Towering Inferno in my mind’s eye, I turned the oven on full blast and threw the peppers in. I have no idea how long they took–I pottered around tidying and cleaning while they roasted, with the occasional peek in the oven whenever I happened to remember that it was on. I transferred them to a bowl when they were blackened all over, and collapsing in on themselves.

After that, I grated the cheese, tracked down a clove of garlic–am I the only person who keeps losing heads of garlic in their kitchen?–and collected the rest of the ingredients. After some light peeling, I threw everything bar the olive oil into my tiny food processor and blitzed away. In a few seconds I had pesto! Why had it taken me so long?

When dinner-time rolled around, I simply stirred the pesto into some penne rigate–don’t forget to add a few tablespoons of the starchy cooking water from the pasta–and dished it up. No dusting of parmesan, no shower of greenest parsley… I wanted to taste every last drop of pesto.

Luscious.

Despite my heavy-handedness with the parmesan, the smoky flavour of the peppers shone through clearly. The non-traditional almonds provided the same slight knobbly texture as pine nuts usually do, and the occasional bit of crunch where the processor missed a bit. I’d class it as a huge success.

Next time I’m going to save some pesto to spread on some crusty bread, perhaps paired with a rosemary-spiked cannellini bean spread. Or stir it into soup….

My head’s a-whirl with possibilities!

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I remember a time when carrot and coriander soup used to be considered almost exotic. Sure, Brits made carrot soup, but coriander? Now that was fancy. These days, carrot and coriander suffers from being commonplace and supermarket shelves and chillers groan under the weight of bland and boring cartons of soup. Frankly, it’s embarrassing for the carrots.

It seems to be a case of extremes–either the flavour of the carrot is dulled by copious amounts of cream or all salt has been omitted in the name of virtuous health. Where has the happy medium gone? Where is my delicious soup? I want my tastebuds to sit up and pay attention when I eat a bowl of soup, not sigh sadly.

As the old axiom says, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” So I did. Twice, in fact, as it was so good. And even better than that, my recipe is zero points on the Weight Watchers programme, which is a very good thing since Dave and I are guzzling it like little piggie-wiggies.

This is a triple-coriander soup–I used ground coriander, coriander stalks and finished off with a handful of chopped leaves. This wasn’t just an exercise in frugality–the stalks add a certain je ne sais quoi to the soup. Still a coriander flavour, but different somehow. I used ground cumin because my old flatmate in Glasgow always threw it in, and it really is a perfect partner for coriander anyway. Garlic because… well, what is soup without garlic? The ginger brings out the natural sweetness of the carrots and the chilli just kicks it up a notch.

Finally, carrot and coriander is exotic again!

PS For more vegetable–not necessarily vegetarian, though–soups, visit Soup’s On! at A Veggie Venture.

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Yesterday marked the inaugural session of Cooking With Mummy. I popped Lucas in his car seat, strategically placed him in a corner so that he could see everything but still be safe, and cooked away! This Cajun Chicken recipe seemed like a good bet–quick preparation, could be done in advance, diet-friendly, and, most importantly looked tasty!

Who knew red peppers could be so entertaining? Lucas gurgled appreciatively every time I introduced a new vegetable to him–next time I should give him a washed pepper to hold–and he seemed to enjoy seeing what caused all the previously mysterious noises in the kitchen. I also discovered that my ability to multi-task is still pretty good, but I probably shouldn’t try to sing songs and chop onions at the same time–I’m sporting a slight nick at the side of my nail which is driving me mad.

I’d class this recipe as a definite success. The amount of spice was just right on both the veggies and chicken; there were gorgeous crispy bits of onions and garlic…. Really, it might have been foolproof, but it was also quite delicious!

Next time I’d be inclined to squeeze over some lime juice just after it comes out of the oven and serve with a spoonful of low-fat creme fraiche or guacamole. It might also be an idea to split the oil and toss the vegetables and chicken with it separately. That’s pretty much gilding the lily, though.

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