Apple Pancakes - Just scrumptious

Recently at a festival I encountered a pancake stall, well crepes if you want to be pedantic, and they had many flavours from savoury tuna melts with cheese and spinach to the super sweet Nutella and banana (I know most people love that but I hate it!)

Anyway, one of the options was 'Apple Pie Crepe' so I went for it, and it was the business! Best pancake ever, simple enough to rustle up for breakfast and also easy to glam up for a dinner party dessert (I can see myself on Come Dine With Me serving this up...)

I paid careful attention so that I can share the recipe with you. If you are in a mood to be fast, you could use pancake mix and/or apple sauce. If you are feeling more 'Nigella' go for the batter made from scratch and your own stewed apples.

So either mix 2 heaped tablespoons of flour, eggs (2) and just over half a pint of milk with a dash of olive oil to create a batter .... or mix up a batter mix.

Have to hand either home stewed apples (diced cooking apples, a tiny bit of water, boil for 20 minutes or until soft, add sugar to taste)  .... or some apple sauce, the sort they sell in jars to have with pork works fine. (I used a jar this time as our apples aren't ripe yet)

You will also need some oil, some brown sugar and cinnamon.

Add some oil to the frying pan and start cooking the pancake, turn it once and spread apple across one half of the pancake, sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon.

Fold the pancake in half, covering the apple. Fry slightly to warm the apple then fold again. serve with marscapone cheese (my favourite!) or icecream, or fresh cream.

Delicious! Why not add some brandy to the apple for a decadent after dinner treat!

Dry January

I'm taking part in dry January this year. For those not au fait with what this entails, dry January is sadly not a guarantee of a rain free month but a chance for people that normally imbibe to ...erm...not.

So for 31 long days I shall be shunning alcohol, no sneaky beer after work, no bottle of cava (and subsequent drunken blog post) on a Sunday after noon, no downing shots until I puke during The Musketeers (well not until February anyway).

What is the point? Well may you ask, it's not long enough to really rest the liver or help my liver function in any way (though I am going to take some milk thistle to see what that might achieve!) and I'm not doing it to raise money for charity (do not get me started on sponsored stuff - that's a whole other post).

I'm doing it because it will be good for me, for me, I'm not saying it would be good for you or you should do it. I hope it will help me sleep better (actually I barely need help there, but maybe I'll be more refreshed from the sleep I do get), I know it will help me save money, at around £5 for a bottle of wine or case of beer I should be £10....£20 .....£30 .... quite a bit better off for not buying it. I also hope it will break the habit of an alcoholic drink each night after work, maybe letting me get back to 'not on a school night'. I'm not a saint or a martyr or better than you, I'm just choosing to not drink alcohol during January.

Why tell us all about it them? Another good question. I think it will be easier and dare I suggest, more fun, to do this as a group with other friends in real life and on social media, also a promise is somehow easier to stick to when you tell everyone about it.

Do you think it's really such a big deal? Well no, not really, I gave up booze no problem for 9 months when I was pregnant and only drank small amounts for the ten months after that as I was breastfeeding, so no I don't think it will be anything other than a minor annoyance.

I'm spending some money on drinks though, just non alccoholic ones. I will be stocking up on Ginger Beer, J2O, sparkling water and various fruit juices, not becasue I think they are healthy but I know I'll get bored of tap water.

Are you taking part? If so what are your reasons? And what will you be drinking instead? I'd love to know.

Eton Mess - A recipe for delight

DD has wanted to try to make meringues for ages. She is a massive fan of Mary Berry and for some reason the idea of making meringues had become a firm fixture in DD's mind. I had been saying no up until now, partly as I didn't want to be left with a lot of egg yolks, partly as the gas oven needs to be on for hours! and partly because I was scared she'd fail and be disappointed.

When I was chosen as one of the Morrison's Mums (Thanks Morrison's and Britmums!)  this week I agreed that DD could use some of the voucher money to get her ingredients and then assuming the meringues were good we could make Eton Mess. We also bought a pack of Morrison's meringues for £1.18 just in case..though I needn't have worried.

DD followed the instructions from this video as she could only find Mary Berry telling you how to make them, not actually demonstrating.



and they turned out great! really nice, crispy on the outside but that slight chewy middle that is the best thing about homemade meringues.

And then we took the cooled meringues and made two versions of Eton Mess, one dairy free.

Recipe For Dairy Free Eton Mess
Home made or bought meringue
Swedish Dairy Free Vanilla Icecream
Fresh Strawberries and raspberries
some caster sugar.

Wash the fruit
Cut the strawberries into smallish pieces, add the raspberries and sprinkle the fruit with a little caster sugar.
Break up the meringues into small pieces
Take a bowl and add a few scoops of the icecream.
Add the meringue and fruit, mix.

Serve in glasses (or just eat the whole lot out of the bowl)


Eton Mess

As above but with clotted cream in place of the icecream. Delicious.

Homemade meringues are hard to price because while 2 eggs and a bit of sugar is pretty cheap the oven is on a fairly long time!
Bought meringues - £1.18
Clotted cream - 95p
Strawberries -from 99p (I bought more expensive ones at £3)
Raspberries -99p
Swedish Dairy Free Glace - £2

so you could have four people noshing down on this delicious dessert for only £1 a pop! Get in!

Getting Fruity!

A fortnight ago (that's 2 weeks for my American readers) my Darling Daughter asked me to buy starfruit. She had had some once, long ago at school when they had a 'tasting day' and had liked it. I also like starfruit, so I bought one.

For those not in the know, it looks like this

and once sliced it is obvious why it is so named

 

I described it as tasting like a cross between an apple and a lemon, but the one 

I had was a little green :-). Any way the starfruit came home, was sliced, and DD took a tentative nibble before declaring, "I don't really like it, it wasn't like this at school". So I ate the starfruit.

This week she requested I buy a pomegranate. "Do you really like them?" I asked, "Yes, I love them, we should have them all the time!" "OK"

So I bought a pomegranate and presented it at breakfast

DD "what's that?"

Me "A Pomegranate"

DD "oh, OK"

I opened the pomegranate, i lovingly separated the pearls of ruby delights (stolen phrase from twitter)  and gave her some in a bowl. A tentative nibble, some mumbles, some discussion of if eating seeds would kill us. Finally........

Me "you didn't mean pomegranate did you? this isn't what you were expecting?"

DD "nope"

Me "what were you expecting?"

DD "a round purple thing, when you cut it, it's orange inside and squishy with black seeds that you spit out"

Me "ah"

Quick trip to Twitter to ask

Turns out she meant Passion Fruit!

So today I am eating pomegranate.

Who knows, soon I may be eating passion fruit.

The one where I get Nakd and there are pictures........

Ok so having grasped you and your dirty minds……

This is the blog I should have written a week ago but I’ve been ill. -- excuses! Pathetic!

The lovely people at Natural balance Foods know how much I like their Nakd fruit/nut bars because I’ve raved about them online before, so they were keen for me to try the new flavours just out. They sent me the three new flavours to try and I did. (see "I get nakd" ;-- see what I did there?)

I’ve always been more of a fan of the fruity flavours than the chocolate, so I was surprised to see that 2 of the new flavours were chocolate based, I must be in the minority I guess.

If you have never had one of these bars before there things you need to know, they don’t look great, they are (mostly) raw.

So issue one :appearance, to be fair they look like compressed squirrel shit (they actually probably share a lot of the contents too!) but this is not reason to not eat them! Oh no! brave the look and bite into the tempting goodness, due to the fact they are raw all the goodness is still there!

issue two: rawness Just squished into a chunk of tastiness are all the vitamins and minerals and fibre and YUM!

Issue three : taste - they are bloody yummy!

So I tried the new Berry flavour first Berry Delight, and it was delightful! As I said I like the berry flavours and feel I’m getting a huge chunk of my 5 a day at the same time as getting a delicious treat, so that was all good.

Then I tried the Cocoa Delight, and while I wasn’t delighted (I told you I prefer the berry!) it was still yummy, very chocolate-y but not ‘sweet’ like a sickly milk chocolate bar. I do love the texture of the bars too.

And last I tried the Cocoa Mint……….and it blew my mind!!!! It is the tastiest most scrumptiously deliciously minty chocolaty bar of goodness I have ever tasted. Even my normally fussy DD agreed to try a nibble when she smelled the minty loveliness of the bar, and she liked it! Yes people of the world, I have discovered healthy snacks that taste so good they could be junk!!

Run to the shops now before I buy all the mint bars!

(That said, I discovered Gingerbread flavour too and my oh my is that one a taste of heaven too! Can’t get enough of this tasty goodness)

Did I mention they are suitable for vegans, they are all natural, no added sugar, and gluten, wheat, dairy & GM free? cos they are!

How old is too old? (or 'sniff it and see')

Every now and again on social media someone says they have chucked away a yoghurt 3 days past the 'use by' date, or asks if bread 2 days past the sell by date is OK to eat or........well you get the idea. They want to know if they can safely consume an item of food that seems to be saying  

NO! DON'T EAT ME, YESTERDAY I WAS FINE 

BUT TODAY I AM FILLED WITH POISONOUS BACTERIA 

THAT WILL KILL YOU IN AN INSTANT 

WITH PAIN YOU CAN ONLY IMAGINE 

or something like that anyway.

I am old enough to know that expiry dates are a fairly new invention. Yes young people you read that right, we have not always been told when food is 'past it's best'. For hundreds, indeed thousands of years we used our own judgement! We looked at things, smelled them, touched them and decided 'is it still good'? (* when I say 'we' I do not, obviously, mean me! I mean the human race, I'm not thousands of years old, or hundreds come to that!)

And in some cases we still do. While supermarkets may wrap your vegetables in a plastic bag with a sticker proclaiming 'use by 9 Feb 2010' your local green grocer is unlikely to do the same, my local green grocer sells cucumbers, they are long and firm and green and that's it! I have to fondle the cucumber and decide how fresh it is! Is it soft? getting limp? then I'll ask if it's discounted or buy a firmer one! (are you all right? some of you appear a little flushed?)

Likewise my butcher does not put 'use by' dates on his pork products, i have to admire his loins and decide if they are fresh, are they greenish in hue? Do they smell? If not, I'm happy, a pink fresh loin is most women's dream, as are his sausages and his faggots! but I digress.

Until 1973 no stores in the UK used best before dates at all! And it was Marks and Spencer that began the trend purely as a marketing technique, to show how 'fresh' their food was! Of course all other food sellers leapt on to the bandwagon to be sure and keep up with the new trend.

It's true that some foods nowadays are hard to see. How can I tell if a tin of beans is 'fresh' or if a carton of orange juice is? and the simple answer is of course that I can't, like the rest of society I rely to some degree on labelling of the packets, but wouldn't it be easier to tell me when it was packed rather than a use by date? When I bake a cake I estimate how long it will last (bad example - 10 minutes in my house) by the date it was baked and then I use judgement.

When I open a loaf of bread and it had a patch of mould on it, I tear off the blue bit and toast the bread! I only throw away the whole loaf if it's more mould than loaf or if the flavour is totally tainted. Marmite can disguise a multitude of tastes.

And yoghurt is gone off milk! As is cheese, it can't go off! Sniff it! how does it smell? I've often eaten yoghurts 2 weeks past their 'use by' dates with no ill effects at all. And cheese can usually just have the mould cut off - after all cheddar is often already 24 months old by the time you buy it! So why would another month make any difference?

But I'm not alone, I am aware that many of you eat food that you have judged to be OK. Just remember it's a skill, learn it, pass it on, don't be afraid, trust your instincts.  My good friend Donna on Twitter sent me this handy link to get you started.

And don't come crying back here if you get sick.


Remember that this advice is just from a boring old person, not anyone clever and don't take risks with the elderly, the very young or the infirm. (No testing mouldy yoghurt out on your granny!)

PS   A website called Love Food Hate Waste perpetuates the myth by saying NEVER eat food past the use by date, which is just silly IMO. They even tell you 'if it looks fine, still throw it away!  I still say that for cheese and many other products this is ridiculous.


If you would like to buy some out of date food to practice on - look here for some cheap deals. Yes indeedy, an online retailer that specialises in old food!

Youch! I just made a terrible mistake

I bought some fruit this morning on the way to work, hoping to improve my diet (of which the main food group consumed is beer) and as I'm lazy I bought one of those little pots of ready prepared yummy fruits - melon, pineapple, etc all the good stuff you never buy because you can't eat a whole one before it goes off (or that may be just me, keen to return to the beer) and it was reduced to 99p so all is good - it's expensive but not that bad I feel ridiculous all day over it (in M&S they are £3.99 how crazy is that? I could buy a pineapple, a melon and some grapes and only eat a 1/4 of each and throw the rest in the compost and STILL save money!) any how the youch bit is........I stored it in the work fridge, didn't let it warm to room temp before lunch and now have to chomp on ICE COLD pieces of pineapple - note to self - buy some Sensodyne toothpaste

even stopping to type all this has not given it the warmth it needs, healthy diet and agonising teeth, here I come