Panettone Bread & Butter Pudding with a Banana Toffee Topping

If you're watching your weight, don't look any further. This is so, so naughty...

Actually quite difficult to photograph...

Ingredients

For the pudding:

Left over panettone (or stale bread), about 8 slices

Butter

2 apples

A good handful of stoned dates

50gm caster sugar

200ml milk

70 ml double cream

3 eggs

Tspn vanilla essence

For the topping:

110gm Demerara sugar

1 ripe banana

60gm butter

2 tablespoons milk

There seems like there's a lot to do here, but it's all easy and quick.

De-core the apples and then chop them and the dates into pretty small chunks. Put them in a bowl and pour over about 70ml of boiling water. Allow to cool.

Whilst that's happening, butter the inside of an oven proof dish and the slices of panettone.

Make the custard by combining the caster sugar, milk and cream in a mixing bowl and...er....mixing. Beat the eggs and the vanilla essence. Add them to the mix and mix some more. When the apple & dates have cooled, add the water to the mix and stir.

Place a layer of panettone in the bottom of the dish and spread the apples and dates across it. Then add a top layer of panettone. Pour the custard over it.

To make the topping, melt the butter in a pan and add the sugar and about two tablespoons of milk. Finely chop the banana and add it too, stirring occasionally while the sugar and banana become toffeeified (don't use this word in Scrabble). Pour over the bread and butter pudding and then pop it into the oven for about 35 minutes on 180, perhaps a touch less if you're using a fan oven.

Serve with custard or cream. Considering the calories in this dessert you might as well have both...

Beetroot, Apple and Mushroom Rice

I may seem a little fixated with apples at the moment. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, they're in season. Secondly, they're free. Thirdly, they're delicious and should be used in savoury dishes far more than they are,

This was cooked up for lunch with a veggie friend and accompanied a vegetarian chilli cooked to this recipe. We served it with grated mature cheddar and sour cream.

Ingredients

200g/7oz long-grain rice

3 beetroots (Used pre-cooked here, but only because we were out of fresh)

3 apples 

A good handful of mushrooms

Half tspn cumin

Half tspn ginger

Cider / cider vinegar

Olive oil - tablespoon

Cook the rice. If you want to go wild, pop a vegetable stock cube in the water. Some folks prefer to let the rice cool before adding to the wok, to avoid clumping, but I rarely bother and find my rice clump free. If only life was clump free (sigh). 

Core the apples - they don't need peeling - and chop. Chop the beetroot and the mushrooms and then warm the olive oil in a wok / large frying pan.  Once the oil is hot, add the fruit and veg to the pan and give a good stir. Add the ginger and cumin and stir again. All you're looking to do here is soften the apples and beetroot (if you're using fresh). Add the cider or cider vinegar (or white wine vinegar if you have neither). Let the liquid boil down - only take a minute or two - and then add the drained rice. 

Stir like Noël Coward to get that great beetroot colour distributed evenly though the rice.

Serve! 

Fast Food v. Home Cooking 1 - Bacon, Veg & Noodles

I've had a very busy few days and not a lot of time for cooking. Thursday, in particular, I'd gone without food for hours and, when Sarah returned from work, we headed straight for the local Chinese. The wait was over ten minutes. Add a couple of minutes walk each way and you've fifteen minutes to cook fresh food to compete with the take out option. Even the branded fast food folks wouldn't be any quicker. The nearest MacDonalds, Kentucky, Pizza Hut would take as long door to door.

On Friday night I was going to The Albany to see The Baptists first gig in 25 years and ended up with about half an hour to cook and eat. I went for the 'Real' fast food option and cooked myself bacon, veg & noodles. I was on my own, so this is a meal for one.

Ingredients

1 'nest' of egg noodles

Half an onion

2 garlic cloves

Half a sweet green pepper

One apple

Half a courgette

2 rashers of bacon

one mushroom

Tspn smoked paprika

Half tspn ground ginger

Tspn of mustard

Ham stock cube

Worcestershire sauce

Oil for frying

Ready, steady, GO!  

Boil the kettle for the noodles. While that's going CHOP! Chop the onion - fry with the heat on high. Chop the garlic - add to pan. Chop and add the bacon. De-core the apple, chop. Chop the pepper, the courgette and the mushroom. Add all to the pan.

As soon as the water's boiled get the noodles on the go. The egg noodles I used, from the excellent little Chinese Supermarket on Market Way, take three minutes.

As soon as the bacon is nicely browned add the spices to the pan. A good splash of Worcestershire and then throw in the stock cube, chopped to make it dissolve quicker. Put in a small amount of the boiling water from the kettle - as soon as the noodles are ready add those and some of the noodle water. Let it bubble for a minute or two.

I reckon five or six minutes - ten minutes quicker than the take out option.

There's no picture for this one - I was in a hurry!

Roast Pork with an Onion and Roasted Vegetable Paella

This is not, strictly speaking, a paella, but artistic licence, etc...

I came across a recipe for a Spanish rice dish, using paella rice, into which all the juices and fat of a roast chicken are poured  towards the end of cooking. Its base is a lots of onion, almost an onion sauce. It really is a very tasty dish.

I thought it would work with pork and it certainly did. The flavours of the pork juices, the cider and the roast vegetables were fabulous - particularly the apple. A great dish to bear in mind with the massive apple crop that's on its way.

The use of booze in cooking is something of an extravagance in this country of ludicrous alcohol duty but, due to the idiocy of the bureaucracy, cider is cheaper than beer and wine on a slug for slug basis. Depriving poor people from using wine and beer in their cooking, through the mechanism of taxation, is inhuman. 

Ingredients

For the rice:

200gm paella rice 

3 onions

4 garlic cloves

1 sweet red pepper

pinch of cayenne pepper

If you have saffron, a few strands, otherwise use about 1 teaspoon of paprika 

500ml of stock - I used a pork stock cube, but vegetable or chicken will do

Fresh parsley or thyme to finish

2 tablespoons olive oil

Cider

For the roast veg:

3 sweet potatoes

3 turnips

4 apples (I used ageing dessert apples)

Cider

For the joint of pork:

Olive oil

Smoked paprika

Sea salt

Black pepper

The pork is straight forward. Cut slashes into the skin, which we want to turn into crackling. Rub the pork with the olive oil and the salt. Then rub in the smoked paprika. 

De-core the apples, you don't need to skin them.  Chop the sweet potatoes, turnips and apples into smallish bite size chunks. Put them into the bottom of an oven pan over which you can place a grill tray with the pork on it to enable the juices to drop into the pan. Cover the veg with a good glug of the cider and top up with water. Put the meat on top of a grill over the pan and put into the oven. Follow the cooking times for the meat you have, of course. Keep an eye on the dish and top up with water if it looks like drying up.

The juices will drip into the pan, the veg will roast rather deliciously and the pork will do its thing. Whilst all that's happening you should be making your paella.

I don't have a paella pan, shame on me, so I use a wok.  Fry the onions slowly in the oil. You want them to be really soft, not browned, so stir often and keep an eye on them. After five minutes or so add the garlic, keeping the heat low. Another five minutes pass before you turn up the heat and add the chopped sweet red pepper. Add the cayenne pepper and the saffron, if you have it. In Spain, if they don't have saffron, which is bloody expensive, they use colorante, but a teaspoon of paprika will do the job.

Once the heat has done its work, add the rice and stir vigorously. You don't want it to burn, but you do want it to absorb the juices in the pan. Add a decent splash of cider and let it be absorbed, then add the stock. I've said 500ml - but read the instructions on the rice. You can always add more liquid later.

A proper paella develops a crust on the bottom, which is delicious. This crust develops by not stirring. If you're not careful, though, you can end up with hard rice on the top, so stir the top of the rice if you want the crust. 

As the pork finishes, put the meat to one side and add the juices and the roasted fruit and veg to the paella. The rice need to be just cooked as you do this. Stir it in and  cook for a couple more minutes. Chop some fresh parsley to sprinkle over the paella when you transfer it to a serving bowl.

I recently made this again but with different veg - beetroot, aubergine and carrot. Equally delicious.