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Blackberry Jam ( Blackberry Jelly)

Blackberry Jam Blackberry JellyIt’s been a beautiful summer, and I’ve focused largely on my children, and very little on anything else, including these pages. I’ve often taken a photo of things, thinking I’d publish them when I have a moment, and that moment has just never come, and here we are, just in time for autumn.

Nature is a beautiful thing though, and knowing full well that the barren months of winter are coming, Autumn blesses us with a bountiful harvest of apples, blackberries, rosehips, damsons and more. My children and I have spent time foraging in our local area, trying to take advantage of the free fruit as much as we can. Over the next few days, I’ll share some of the results of our foraged free food with you.

Today’s recipe is a bit of a cheat: Blackberry Jam. It’s a cheat because I used Jam Sugar with added pectin rather than making my own. We were lucky, I think and got the berries at just the right time, as they were sweet, full of juice and just delicious.

I use a jam strainer to catch all the seeds and skins, leaving me with a beautiful clear jam.

Blackberry Jam
 
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The flavour of this jam depends a lot on the blackberries you use. We picked plump, juicy, ripe blackberries to make a sweet, delicious jam for toast, home made doughnuts and more.
Author:
Recipe type: Condiments
Serves: 250ml
Ingredients
  • 250g (9oz)fresh blackberries
  • 250g (9oz) jam sugar
  • 2tbs lemon juice (if from a bottle)/ juice from ½ lemon if using fresh lemon
Instructions
  1. (If you're using a stove to make jam, you'll need a sugar thermometer to check when your mixture is at 100C/212F. If you're using a breadmachine with a jam function, follow manufacturer instructions. For a Thermomix®, cook at 100 degrees at speed 2. )
  2. Place all ingredients in bowl and cook for 40 minutes at 100C or 212F.
  3. To check whether your jam has set, tilt the bowl slightly, being careful not to spill boiled sugar! Check to see whether a slight gel forms on top. If not, return to heat for five minute intervals. Your external temperature will affect how long your jam has to boil.
  4. It shouldn't take over 50 minutes, but if it does, turn the heat up as high as possible (watching it doesn't burn) for 3 minutes.
  5. Pour jam into sterilised jars and leave overnight to cool.

 

 

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{Book Review} and Grilled Vegetable Quinoa

Apart from my two pregnancies, I’ve always been a meat eater, but after almost ten years of supermarket meat in the UK my husband and I decided that we would rather reduce the number of times a week that we eat meat, and buy organic meat to eat less often. This has worked exceptionally well and the meat we’ve been eating in the last two months has been amazing. In the balance, however, has been more vegetarian meals.

Vegetarian Step-by-Step Grilled Veggie Quinoa

Once upon a time I assumed a veggie meal meant salad with a side of cucumber. Not my favourite. But while it’s taken a few years, I’ve finally grown to understand how good vegetarian food can be.

I was recently invited to be part of the Parragon Books book club, and one of the first books I’ve received to review was the Love Food Vegetarian Step-By-Step cookbook*.

I am loving this book.

It really is ideal for beginner cooks, whether they’re five or 35, as each recipe uses basic, relatively simple ingredients, and a really good step by step guide to the directions.

The book is beautifully illustrated, with all the ingredients laid out in the first picture, what it all looks like in the preparation, and finally, the end result.

Another thing that is absolutely fabulous about this book is the fact that bits and pieces of recipes can be used together or apart. For example I used only the Cheese Pastry sticks bit of the Celeriac Soup With Cheese Pastry Sticks recipe. It’s nicely set out that you can, even as a beginner, choose the bits you want.

I own many cook books, most of which I know I’ll only ever make four or five recipes out of, but in this book, there are no recipes that I can say no, I’ll definitely never make that. It’s set to become a favourite, for sure.

Below is the first recipe I made from the Love Food Vegetarian Step-By-Step cookbook*, and I’m sure there’ll be more!

4.0 from 1 reviews
{Book Review} and Grilled Vegetable Quinoa
 
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A lovely vegetarian dish, ideal on it's own or served as a side to something else. Easily adaptable too, if you don't have the same vegetables feel free to use others. Don't skip the pine nuts though - they totally make the dish. The instructions differ a little from the original, but work out perfectly.
Author:
Recipe type: Main Course
Cuisine: Vegetarian
Serves: 3
Ingredients
  • 2 peppers, deseeded and cut into chunky pieces
  • 1 large courgette, cut into chunks
  • 1 small fennel bulb, cut into slim wedges
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
  • 1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
  • 100g/3.5 oz quinoa
  • 350ml/12 fl oz vegetable stock
  • 2 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 3 tbsp flat leaf parsley
  • 40g 1.5 oz pine nuts, toasted
  • salt and pepper
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6.
  2. Lightly toast the pine nuts in a hot pan and set aside to cool.
  3. Chop vegetables and put in a bowl.
  4. Drizzle over olive oil and mix so that it covers all the vegetables.
  5. Arrange the chopped vegetables in a single layer in a roasting tin.
  6. Roast for 25 - 30 minutes.
  7. Place the quinoa, stock and garlic in a saucepan (or in the Thermomix®), bring to the boil and cover to simmer for 12 - 15 minutes, or until the quinoa is tender and most of the stock has been absorbed.
  8. Mix the quinoa in with the vegetables and top with the toasted pine nuts and flat leaf parsley, and serve immediately.

nutrition

*affiliate link. It won’t cost you any extra to buy through this link, but Amazon will give me 5% of the sale price, which goes towards helping paying for this blog. Thanks for supporting us!

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Honey Rosemary Twist Bread

Honey Rosemary Twist BreadI was watching a show on TV where the chef made a bread very similar to my usual bread recipe, but instead of olive oil, she added seed oil, and then added a lot of nuts. and seeds. I have a very good seedbread recipe, so I wasn’t overly desperate to try a new one, but when she added honey I remembered the honey and rosemary bread that a Thermomix® demonstrator in Australia had made for us, and I suddenly thought I had to try something similar combining the two ideas into one bread. Here is the very delicious result of that experiment.

Honey Rosemary Twist Bread
 
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Author:
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 650g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 7g sachet or two teaspoons of fast action dried yeast
  • 4 teaspoons of honey
  • 1 tbsp sesame oil
  • 3 - 4 tbsp chopped rosemary
  • 350g (1.5 cups) warm water
Instructions
  1. Add everything to your bowl in the order mentioned.
  2. In the Thermomix®, mix for 20 seconds, then knead for 3 minutes.
  3. If you're using a different processor or kneading by hand, you need to knead it until it is firm and springy, about 10 minutes (i.e. if you dent it with your finger, it should spring back to cover the dent)
  4. Divide the dough into three, and roll out each ball into a long strip.
  5. Twist each strip into a twisty rope, then put all three together and twist again into one big twist.
  6. Place on your baking tray - I use a gorgeous Pampered Chef stone bake tray which is perfect for breads - in a circle.
  7. Cover for 30 minutes to let it rise.
  8. Switch on the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6 now and place the bread inside, letting it cook for 20 minutes as the oven heats up and reaches temperature.
  9. The loaf is cooked when it sounds hollow when tapped underneath. If not, then give it another five minutes or so in the oven.
  10. Once ready remove from the oven and serve with salad. It also goes really well with red meat or roasted butternut soup, or anything that goes well with rosemary.