Yet more about loganberries...

Our loganberries are still going strong & we have found some other uses for them. They made a wonderful topping for a fruit pavlova a couple of weeks ago - even at their most ripe, loganberries still have a very tart quality so they work well with the sugary meringue & rich cream of the pavlova.



For that same quality of tartness loganberries make a fabulous ingredient in fruit muffins. Here's my recipe:

Loganberry & almond muffins

225g self raising flour (we prefer wholemeal)
1tsp baking powder
50g butter
40g roughly chopped almonds
75g sugar
250ml buttermilk (or milk if you don't have buttermilk)
2 large free range eggs
175g loganberries
granulated sugar for sprinkling

Preheat your oven to 190C/gas 5 & prepare a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin cases.

Sieve the flour & baking powder into a large bowl & then rub the butter into the flour until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs (I use my food mixer to do this bit). Stir in the sugar & the chopped almonds.

In a jug, measure out the buttermilk & then add the 2 eggs & beat them together gently with a fork.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry & stir very gently with a metal spoon. Add the loganberries (reserving 24) at the last minute & stir very gently just to distribute them in the mixture.

Distribute the mixture evenly between the muffin cases, top with 2 loganberries on each muffin & sprinkle with granulated sugar.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown on top.

Gorgeous for breakfast or for a teatime snack. Eat on the day you make them, preferably warm from the oven.

Rumtopf
We have used up any excess loganberries in our rumtopf which we started a couple of weeks ago. The basic premise of rumtopf is that you take equal quantities of fruit (especially soft fruit) & sugar, cover with rum or brandy and keep in a large crock or preserving jar until Christmas time when you eat & drink the contents (hic!). Traditionally fruit is added as it becomes available through the season - we have found that raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries & plums have worked very well. This year, so far, we have used raspberries, tayberries, loganberries, blackcurrants & blackberries. It is already smelling tremendous.

More from the Garden

The summer weather that finally arrived last week has kick-started various bits and pieces that we have growing. We've had our first tomatoes - it's a cliche to say it, but there really is no tomato like one you've just picked, still warm from the greenhouse. We've had a bit of a problem with blossom end rot this year, partly because of the weather meaning that watering has been a bit too erratic. The good news about that (as well as it only affecting a few fruits) is that you can just chop off the manky bit on the end and still eat the rest of the tomato. The chillies are also doing well with the generally sunny weather - we've had to space them out a bit better too to make sure the air can circulate around them. And we have some very exciting looking little aubergines coming on, as you can see from the picture below...

What to do with Kohlrabi

Kohlrabi's always been one of those vegetables that I've not been sure about. It looks kind of exotic, with its purple and white stripes, but it's a pretty basic root vegetable, as likely to be used to feed livestock as end up on your plate in its own right. We used to wander past the ranks of them displayed at the market, not quite sure if it would just end up sitting in the fridge too long and ending up in the compost. Happily, it's very simple to use - just grate it or slice it very thinly and it makes a great addition to a sandwich or a salad. This works best with smaller specimens like the ones that are available at the moment - when they get bigger later in the year the best place for them is in a nice stew or casserole.

A great combination is thickly sliced ham, grated kohlrabi and English mustard. The kohlrabi has a nice crunch and a delicious peppery flavour. Especially nice on sourdough or a light rye loaf.

More beer

I finally got round to keeping some of our second brew in the glass long enough to get a picture of it. We've been drinking it for a few weeks now and there are probably only about 5 or 6 pints of it left! One thing I've found out is that if the keg (this one's been living in a King Keg bottom tap) is used a lot over a short period of time, it can lose a fair bit of its CO2 pressure, making the beer reluctant to come out and lose a bit of its sparkle. It's not a huge problem, as it's still coming out and tasting delicious, but might be more of an issue when I'm using my 'top tap' keg that relies more on barrel pressure to dispense the beer.

One way around this would be to top up with carbon dioxide from a soda stream cylinder (art of brewing sell an adapter for the top of the keg) and re-pressurize the keg that way. Or to take less beer from it at each visit. Difficult when it tastes so nice!

Anyway, having finally posted a picture of the finished article, it's pretty much time to transfer the latest brew (a golden ale using Protz & Wheeler's recipe for Exmoor Gold) into its keg to mature. We're hoping there won't be too big a beer-less gap between the two batches. But then there's always the great new beer shop in Burslem - last night we opened bottles of Aventinus & Duchesse de Bourgogne courtesy of The Beer Emporium on Market Street. I'll do a proper post about this excellent shop soon.

Another loganberry recipe

Our loganberry crop goes from strength to strength in spite of (perhaps because of) all the rain. We have finished the loganberry jam I made earlier on in the season very very quickly I thought I'd better do some more preserving. We also have quite a few windfall apples in the garden from next door's tree so I decided to take advantage of them & make some loganberry jelly. The recipe is very straightforward & a pretty standard jelly recipe.

Loganberry & windfall apple jelly
Loganberries
Apples (early windfalls, crab apples or cooking apples)
Water
Sugar

Take equal quantities of loganberries & apples (peeled & chopped but not cored), cover them in water in a large pan & simmer gently until the fruit is very soft (about an hour). Pour the contents of the pan into a jelly bag & suspend over a basin or bowl to collect all the juice. Leave to strain overnight.

Now you have a decision to make - in order to obtain a very clear jelly you must not squeeze the jelly bag to get more juice out of the fruit. Frankly I hate the waste of all this lovely juice & with dark jellies like this one it is very hard anyway to see whether it is clear or not so I tend to squeeze as much as I can out of the bag. It's up to you. Now weigh the juice & add an equal quantity of sugar & put the whole lot into a large pan.

Heat the juice & sugar together very very gently until all the sugar has dissolved, then turn up the heat & let the allow the liquid to boil rapidly at a rolling boil for about 15 minutes until the setting point is reached. This is at 105C or 220F on a confectioners thermometer. If you don't have a thermometer put 2 saucers in the freezer before you start the boil & use these to test for setting - pour a little spoonful onto a saucer & leave for a minute. Push the jelly with your fingertip - if it has a skin & wrinkles up then you have reached setting point.

Allow the jelly to cool a little, stir, then pour the into sterilised jars and put a wax paper circle on top of the jelly immediately. Allow to cool then label up.

Enjoy!

Yet more bargains..

Following on from the previous post about the Big Box Of Bach, a nod to another special offer that finishes at the end of this month, this time further discounting a range of budget reissues.

Warner are in the process of re-releasing a number of recordings originally put out by Teldec as part of the 50th anniversary of the 'Das Alte Werk' imprint. The classical music specialists Europadisc have the entire range on special offer until July the 30th - down to £5 for a single CD and £7.50 for a double. There are more treasures here than you can shake a good sized stick at, but I'll pick out a few personal favourites and some others I have my eye on. To see the whole range, go to their 'Advanced Search' page and type 'Das Alte Werk' into the 'Label' field.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt is particularly well-represented. His recording of Bach's B Minor Mass doesn't really need my voice adding to its general high regard. But, for me, it's partly the sound of leaden-footed, foursquare Bach performance being cast aside; lithe and well-paced with wonderful solo contributions, it also stands up brilliantly in its own right. Harnoncourt's interpretation of Haydn's 'Nelson Mass' is also well worth trying out. I already posted around Easter time on Harnoncourt's St John Passion - available here at a ridiculously low price.

The ensemble Il Giardino Armonico also do well with at least a couple of outstanding recordings. Their interpretation of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos is wonderful - punchy, zesty and stylish. Not so long ago, the hypercritical judges of Radio 3's 'Building a Library' picked it as their top choice. For once, I agree with them! I've also been enjoying Il Giardino Armonico's selection of 'Christmas Concertos': Corelli, Vivaldi, Torelli and others. A little unseasonal, but a great addition to a collection of Christmas music & good fun at any time of year.

Back to Bach, there's also the recording by Herbert Tachezi (who played organ for Concentus Musicus Wien in Harnoncourt & Leonhardt's complete cantata cycle) of the Art of Fugue. I've also noticed that the special offer price applies to pre-orders, a whole batch of CDs due to be released on Monday. A couple featuring the Monteverdi Choir of Hamburg stand out: Bach's Jagdkantate (Hunt Cantata) & Schutz's St Luke Passion.

Frankly there's just too much to do justice to here. And here's the drawback of special offers - when bargains arrive in large numbers are are just too tempting...

Gooseberries

We are still hoping to go Pick Your Owning very soon - somehow it keeps getting put off, mainly because the weather has been so dreadfully rainy - but in the meantime I managed to pick up a kilo of gooseberries being sold by Kenyon Hall Farm at a local Craft Fair. Gooseberries are one of our favourite fruits & we hope to be growing our own in the next couple of years - they are so versatile, making fantastic jam, jelly, chutney, pies, ice cream & they always taste fantastic.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend ages topping & tailing (oh most hated of jobs) so decided I would have a go at a recipe for Gooseberry Curd from Auntie Kath's clipping collection.

Gooseberry Curd
1kg gooseberries (washed but not topped & tailed)
5 heads of elderflower if available (I used some elderflower cordial when stewing the gooseberries)
500g caster sugar
100 unsalted butter, cubed
4 eggs, lightly beaten

Put the berries & elderflowers in a pan with 2 tbsp of water (or elderflower cordial) & simmer very gently until the fruit is tender.

Leave to cool, remove the flowers & press the berries through a nylon sieve.

Put the fruit into a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, add the sugar & stir until it has dissolved. Add the butter a little at a time stirring all the time to make sure it is all melted & blended together.

Add the eggs a little at a time, using a sieve to strain out those nasty lumpy eggy bits that you don't want floating around in your curd.

Keep stirring for about 15 minutes making sure that the water in the lower pan does not boil - otherwise you will end up with gooseberry flavour scrambled eggs.

As soon as the curd has thickened up, remove from the heat, pour the curd into warm sterilised jars then cover.

This curd will keep for 2-3 weeks in the fridge. It contains partially cooked eggs so if that worries you don't serve it to anyone who is vulnerable to tummy upsets.

Musical bargain of the year?

Until the end of this month, you can pick up an amazing bargain at classical music specialists MDT. The classical music industry may be finding things tough at the moment, and perhaps because of this there seems to be a constant arrival of re-packaged classics from the back catalogues of major labels. The giant Warner Records (technically Warner Classics & Jazz) owns the catalogue of Teldec and not only have we seen individual recordings from Das Alte Werk (I'll blog about some of these later this week), but the pioneering complete recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred cantatas led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt & Gustav Leonhardt. 60 CDs which MDT are selling for a paltry £96 until July the 28th (it's currently £150 at Amazon and £144 at Europadisc - both very good prices too!).

I'd thought that Brilliant Classics' astonishingly cheap re-issue of Alistair Dixon & the Chapelle du Roi's collection of the complete works of Thomas Tallis would be the best recent boxset I'd picked up - 10 CDs filled with wonderful music for a paltry £20 - but it's the Harnoncourt & Leonhardt set that has to be, for me, the bargain of the year.

Words like 'groundbreaking' and 'classic' are probably bandied about with too much abandon. But this monumental project for once fits both terms. The first to follow through theories on instrumentation and performance practice and record throughout (with two exceptions) using all-male voices, you can pretty much trace back the 'period instrument' and 'period performance' movements that have revitalised the music of the baroque period to Harnoncourt, Leonhardt and their colleagues. It's probably a bit of an irreverent comparison, but just like punk swept away the bloated musical dinosaurs of the 1970s, this enterprise marks a vital step away from the foursquare 'monumental' school of Bach performance which, for me, can swamp the music.

There are too many highlights to list them here. One highlight that stretches across a large proportion of the set consists of the vocal performances of tenor Kurt Equiluz. I'd earlier come across him when trawling through various recordings of the Christmas Oratorio (Weihnachtsoratorium) for our Christmas website. If anything, the sum of his performances in the cantatas is a significantly greater achievement. He almost always seems able to achieve the sometimes tricky balance between personal expression and the requirements of the text and the musical vision of each cantata. The three cantatas whose equivalent liturgical date was yesterday (BWV 186, 187 & 107) are exemplary - clarity of line, stylish playing and an utterly committed energy run through each one.

There are dissenting voices - Nikolaus Harnoncourt in particular is someone who prompts much passionate discussion on the Bach Cantatas website (for instance, on this page). What do people object to? These are the early days of 'authentic instruments' or 'period performance' and the theory behind it (especially the rather esoteric point about short notes rather than long legato notes during recitatives) and its realisation (particularly what can sound on occasion like a struggle to keep the period instruments in tune) are anathema to some. Similarly, boy sopranos rather than adult female sopranos are used throughout (with the exception of Barbara Bonney in BWV 199 & Marianne Kweksilber in BWV 51): some people don't like the sound, some think the boys aren't up to it.

For me these are quibbles. Again, speaking personally, there are times when it doesn't work - but these times are the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes there are problems with tuning; occasionally the music seems to be a stretch too far for some of the boy soloists. But quibbling over details, for me, rather misses the point. Here it's not so much a question of how important these recordings were - you can understand their effect on performance practice without necessarily wanting to listen to them! What's most important to me is more the way in which you can hear the collective vision, moulded by Harnoncourt & Leonhardt, applied to music of bewildering variety and quality, turned out week after week by the cantor of St Thomas in Leipzig. This is music-making on the edge - the rewards in pursuing such a risky, edgy vision far outweigh the times when it doesn't quite come off. You don't have to take my word for it. Peter Watchorn, whose own harpsichord recordings - especially JS Bach's Well Tempered Clavier - are well worth seeking out, has written an inspiring review for the US Amazon site - linked to here.

It's a huge box of delights and more than holds its own in comparison to people who have turned their hand to the cantatas since like Philippe Herreweghe, Ton Koopman, Sigiswald Kuijken & Masaaki Suzuki (to name just a few). To still stand up so well more than 30 years since it was started is quite an achievement.

Exciting, slightly nerve-wracking: pictures from the garden

It's a great time of year - although also slightly fraught. It's when the plants you've seen grow from seed start to do what they're meant to do and produce their fruits. It's also when things can start to go wrong! Unfortunately one of the types of trailing tomatoes we planted up in hanging baskets appears to have picked up some kind of virus that's turning the leaves yellow-y and generally making them look a bit poorly. They're still trying to produce tomatoes, but whether or not they'll come to anything is decidedly iffy. It's just one variety affected (the golden pearl), so fingers crossed for everything else...

On a happier note, I already blogged about the delicious strawberries that are starting to get to eating ripeness and we've already used the first loganberries. And, fingers crossed, it looks like everything else is doing quite well. We should have lots of tomatoes (pic 1), stacks of chillies (pic 2) & a nice crop of plums (pic 3). Nearly decision time as to how we use them and preserve them for use through the autumn and winter.

Out with the old and (almost!) in with the new!

We enjoyed our last pints of the first homebrew over the weekend, as midsummer drew to a close. Rather amazingly (it seems to me) this maiden attempt at all-grain brewing - we called it Brampton Mild - was a big success taste-wise. It tasted quite similar to the Greene King XX Mild we enjoyed at the Free Press in Cambridge. Still keeping fingers crossed about the second go, which I posted about previously on the blog and which we sampled at just under 2 weeks in the barrel at the weekend. It seems to be going well - bit more hoppy than the first one and lighter, but nice and clean-tasting. The moment of truth will be next Wednesday, not least because we've got a beer-loving friend coming to visit... Another visitor over the weekend was impressed by the rhubarb fizz cocktail.

So I'm very impressed so far by the recipes and method described in Protz & Wheeler's book, as well as by the quality of the ingredients supplied by art of brewing and hopshop. On those recipes, for the mild we followed their recipe for Arkell's Mash Tun Mild and for the second beer we used the one for Belhaven 80 Shilling. I'll definitely go back to the mild recipe as a break from exploring new ones.

The first soft fruit of the season

We have loganberries (planted by my enthusiastic jam-maker dad when he 1st moved here) in our inherited garden which is very pleasing. They are ripening up very well & it looks as if we are going to get A LOT! I managed to pick a half a kilo yesterday. We are completely out of rhubarb jam so decided to make some with loganberries - just as well as a few of the berries I picked were fairly underripe - just right for jam in fact.

Inheritance is actually a bit of a theme here because the recipe I used comes from a book of recipes collected together by my godmother, Kath, who died back in 1994. She left me all her books (she knew me well) & I turn to one or other of her collection most days. The best recipe books are in fact the collections she put together herself from all sorts of sources - magazine cuttings, WI publications, newspaper columns & passed on by friends. It's lovely to see her writing there & it takes my breath away when every so often I come across my late mum's handwriting on one of the pieces pasted in...

Anyhow here's auntie Kath's recipe for raspberry jam adapted for loganberries. Her clipping is annoted with 'BBC - 1937 - Very Good':

Loganberry Jam
To each lb of fresh loganberries measure 1 1/4lb sugar. Warm sugar in a low oven (Gas 3, 160C) until it is very warm (do be careful not to create toffee at this stage...). Whilst the sugar is warming put the loganberries in a suitable pan over a gentle heat. Mash a little with a wooden spoon & when the juice runs add the sugar. Boil very fast for 3 minutes exactly. Pot as usual.

The resulting jam is absolutely delicious - it has a VERY soft set so I would imagine wouldn't keep for as long as something a little more jammy. But the short boil means that the conserve retains a lot more of that delicious loganberry flavour. We enjoyed it yesterday spooned over greek yogurt for our breakfast. Wow - it was a great way to start a beautiful sunny day.

Thanks dad & auntie Kath...

Seasonal Cocktail - The Bloodhound

The strawberries that grow in all sorts of places round our garden are just starting to ripen (as are the loganberries, but that's another post!). They're delicious eaten straight from the plants, warmed by the sun, but also contribute to a fantastic cocktail that we're enjoying at this very moment. It's a good way to use them, because you don't need that many - perfect when they're just coming in and you haven't enough to make a decent sized pudding. The recipe's from Harry Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book.

You need: 2-3 strawberries; gin; red Italian vermouth (we like to use Punt e Mes); white French vermouth (Noilly Prat or, even better, Dolin).

Crush strawberries in your cocktail shaker. I used the bottom of a rolling pin and then added the alcohol (to rinse the strawberries off the end of it): 1 measure of gin; 1/2 a measure each of Italian & French vermouth. Add ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

The standard strainer you get in a cocktail shaker lets big lumps of strawberry through, which you might think is ok, but we preferred it strained through a small sieve.

It's lovely: you get a big hit of strawberry up front and then a nice complex bitterness from the vermouths, a hit of gin and then a nice big finish from the punt e mes. A lesser vermouth might not give you the same finish....