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Spicy butternut squash soup recipe

Posted by on Wednesday 27 October 2010 in cooking, recipes | 2 comments


I made this spicy butternut squash soup for lunch for John, Strowger and me yesterday; Strowger liked it so much that he wanted the recipe so I thought I’d put it on here :)

For us spice fiends, it’s more flavourful rather than head-exploding spicetastic – if you’d prefer the latter, just add more dried chilli flakes. The flavour comes more from the cumin & ginger than from the chilli.

If you don’t have a blender or stick blender, using a potato masher to squash the … squash when it’s ready. The resulting soup won’t be quite as smooth but it should break down easily to give a chunky soup consistency.


Spicy Butternut Squash soup recipe

Makes: 5-6 decent size servings
Total cost: the butternut squash was £1 so probably about £1.50 in total

Ingredients

1 large onion
25g of butter
2 cloves of garlic (or 2tsp of garlic puree)
2tbsp of cumin seeds
1 large butternut squash (it weighed about 3lb before any prep)
1.5ltr of hot veg stock (ish)
2 large pinches of dried chilli flakes (add more or less depending on your spice tolerance)
2tsp of ground ginger
Black pepper
Salt (to taste)

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Simple spicy smoked mackerel kedgeree recipe

Posted by on Thursday 7 October 2010 in cooking, recipes | 5 comments

We had some reduced-to-clear smoked mackerel in the freezer so I decided to make some kedgeree for a quick but tasty dinner on Monday evening.

It’s a bit buttery, pretty spicy and quite, quite fishy – basically yum on a plate. And it’s easy to make too.


Easy spicy kedgeree recipe

  • Makes 3 large portions – and extra egg and a little more rice would easily make four medium size ones.
  • Takes about 15 minutes
  • Cost – about 80p per portion (although with our reduced-to-clear fish and homegrown eggs, ours was about 30p the other day – win!)

Ingredients

  • Two large knobs of butter (25g)
  • An onion
  • Garlic – a clove or equivalent puree
  • 200g (basmati) rice
  • 500ml of veg stock
  • 200g (ish) smoked mackerel
  • 2 (or 3) eggs – hard-boiled
  • Fresh coriander leaves to taste

Spices:

  • 1 decent fresh red chilli or 1/2 tsp of dried chilli flakes
  • 2tsp of curry powder
  • 1tsp of cumin seeds
  • 1tsp of whole coriander seeds
  • 1tsp of yellow or brown mustard seeds
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Super easy blackberry jam recipe

Posted by on Tuesday 21 September 2010 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 11 comments

I love cooking but I have a surprisingly low tolerance for faff – particularly faff involving large quantities of sticky substances that need to sit for a long amount of time. I’m also very clumsy, live with an equally clumsy boy, and have less than graceful pets. In other words, preserves that involve the use of jelly bags are not for me.

Most blackberry jam recipes are more like blackberry jelly recipes – they involve straining out the juice and using that to make to the finished pulp-free seedless product. However, if you don’t mind partial berries and seeds, this blackberry jam is super easy and tastes really, really good!


Super easy blackberry jam recipe

1kg of fruit – blackberries and peeled/cored apples (see note #1 below)
1kg of jam sugar (see note #2 below)
1 lemon (see note #3 below)
100ml of water

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