Spicy Pear And Butternut Squash Soup

The weather has been horrendous lately. Snow, ice, wind and rain. Ick. it is the perfect weather for soup. Hot, spicy, filling soup.

Pears, roast garlic and plenty of curry powder work beautifully with the bitternut squash. Yummy!

Ingredients. 

3 Pears

1 Butternut squash

5 or 6 Cloves of garlic 

2 Large potatoes

1 Onion

3 Good sized carrots

Some stock (home made or from a packet, I personally don't have enough room in the freezer to keep fresh Stock on hand.)

Mild curry powder

Paprika

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

Method

Peel, de-seed and chunk the butternut squash. Peel, de-seed and chunk the pears. Peel and crush the garlic cloves. In a deep baking dish (like a lasagne pan) toss the squash, pear and garlic in olive oil, salt, pepper, 1 teaspoon of paprika and 1 of curry powder. Pop in a  hot over for 30 to 45 minutes.

Chop the onion, peel and dice the carrots and potatoes. Sweat the onions in a large soup pot with some oilve oil and some more seasoning if you like (I usually add another teaspoon or two of curry powder in at this point.) Toss in the carrot and potatoes and give a good stir. Spoon in the roast squash, pears and garlic. Pour over with warm stock until 3/4 to 4/5th full. Cover. 

When the potatoes and carrots are soft take pot off the heat and blend until smooth with a stick blender. This shouldn't be too much work. Pop back on the heat for 10 or so minutes until piping hot. 

Then serve up and enjoy! 

Minnie xoxo

Fruit!

So do you all remember this post about Christmas cake?

Well, brace yourselves, there are 90 days till christmas. Yeah you read that right. 90 days. So its time to get this cake rolling and out of the way!

First things first, we need to prepare and soak the fruit at least a day in advance. We really want the fruit to soak up the alcohol to help the cake keep well for the next 90 days or so. So for this we need:

200g of glacé cherries (I used French style because they are cheaper here and I prefer the way they taste)

200g of candied peel (some times referred to as mixed peel)

1kg of currants and sultans mixed

(if peel and cherries are not your thing just sub with more dried fruit)

175ml of dark rum

25ml of vanilla extract or essence

So messy job first. Take your cherries and snip them in half. Its a messy sticky job but it serves two purposes, the cherries go further and you can be quite sure that there are no stones that have been missed during processing left in the fruit.

I just snip them right into a large mixing bowl before adding the dried fruit and peel. Give it a wee mix then add the rum and vanilla. Mix again, cover the bowl with cling film and pop in the fridge over night.

It doesn't look like much, but believe me it smells amazing.

And don't worry if this is all too early for you , I'll be posting the recipe as a whole too!

Take care, Minnie xoxo

The Cake Bandit.

Whenever I'm homesick for feeling listless I bake, this process usually involves something sweet from my childhood or scones. If its scones they're all we'll eat for about two days and then we're back to lovely things like vegetables and other non scone items. We emerge from a crab haze no worse the wear for it.

But if I'm in a sweet making mood then the Cake Bandit comes out to play, otherwise we wouldn't actually be able to, you know, fit through the door to leave the house. So after we've had our fill with a cuppa, the offending sweets get wrapped up and deposited in the arms of friends and workmates. I am the cake bandit.

Today I donned the cake bandit cape. I made Millionaire's Shortbread, which to the rest of the world is Caramel slice. It takes me back to primary school, the dinner ladies used to offer it as a pudding option.

It take a bit of time, so pick a day when you've got time to float about and procrastinate, or cheat. More on the cheating later. The Recipe consists of three parts, the chocolate top, the dulce de leche middle and the shortbread base.And its all easier than you think.

Millionaire's Shortbread


300g chocolate (or if you're afraid of tempering chocolate, a bar of cake topping does fairly well)
50g caster sugar
100g plain flour
100g ground rice (but 200g of flour will still result in a perfectly serviceable short bread if you've no ground rice)
100g butter and a little extra
A pinch of salt
A dust of cocoa powder
A small (379g) can of condensed milk

Peirce the lid of the condensed milk, put the tin in a pot or slow cooker, fill with hot water till it reaches 3/4 of the way up the can and leave to simmer for three hours or so.

Dump the flour, rice flour, salt and flour into a bowl, cut or rub in the butter. press the mix into a lined tray with your hands or the side of a glass to get a nice and even surface, jab a few times with a fork then pop into a medium hot oven till it just takes on a golden suggestion of colour at the edges. Set aside to cool. Given that the dulche de leche takes forever to cook, this shouldn't be an issue.

Once the condensed milk has reached its lovely golden toffee colour (it bubbles through the hole in the can, if you didn't make a hole then the can would explode) its time to spread that lovely stuff all over the short bread, this doesn't need to be neat or pretty. Melt the chocolate with a tiny teeny amount of butter in a bain marie or in the microwave in 15 second bursts. Pour over the lot, sprinkle with cocoa powder before the chocolate sets and pop it gently into the fridge.

If you don't have time to sit about and wait for the condensed milk to do its thing you can pop it in a pan with some butter, a little brown sugar and a pinch of salt and simmer the mix gently till it thickens. This will give a more complete flavour but its a tricky one to gauge, if you boil it you'll end up with a talky sugar crumble. Which is nice, but not what we're looking for here.

Look at all that squidgy goodness. MMMMmm. Squidgy.