Doesn't do dishes

It's three months since I became a lady of leisure and although I haven't done as much cooking and blogging in that time as I had daydreamed about while still chained to my desk, some of my most enjoyable days have been sunny weekdays where I've had time to potter about unhindered, chopping, roasting and keeping stock pots on a bare simmer. On one such sunny day last week, I made jam.

The near-drought conditions in the South East England, freakish levels of sun and I guess a bit of luck have flooded the shops with exceptionally sweet and juicy strawberries a bit earlier than usual, and most of the supermarkets had them at the bargainous price of £1.99 for 400g.  As much as I love my local farm produce supplier the supermarkets seemed to get first pickings, and at that price I thought I'd give the jam pan an outing.

I've never made jam before.  Marmalade has been my favoured homemade preserve, probably because of the prohibitive cost of local soft fruits and my inability to resist a bowl of luscious berries long enough to dig out the jam sugar and maslin pan.

At that price though, I bought some for eating and some for jam making.  All in, my 6 jars of jam cost £8.10 which I think is pretty good value.  And at the risk of sounding like the Mastercard advert, my kitchen being filled with the smell of my childhood was priceless. My granny used to make strawberry jam, and making my own sent me straight back to being a wee girl, eating the cooled jammy froth that she skimmed off the boiling pan and scraping out the pan once the jam was in jars. Happy days.

The recipe I followed is from the River Cottage Handbook No.2: Preserves by Pam "The Jam" Corbin.  I'm certain you'll have a recipe for jam somewhere; in a cookbook, handed down from your dad, mum or granny or a couple of clicks away in a search engine.  But if you're new to the art of preserves and jellies or at all nervous about bottling up fruits and vegetables for the cupboard, buy this book.  The recipes are varied and numerous, and I imagine indispensable for allotment keepers, but as with so many River Cottage books, its the writing around the recipes that's the most valuable.  So as much as the recipe below will be fine for those au fait with the sugar thermometer and a stack of Le Parfait jars to hand, if you're less familiar, trust Pam to guide you through seasonality, setting points and shelf life of these storecupboard staples.

If you are the type who makes jams and chutneys, then you probably also hoard jars.  Perhaps obsessively, and have boxes of them in the cellar....If that's you, you'll have no need to use sites like Just Preserving or Wares of Knutsford for stocks of regular jam jars, or fancier Kilner and Le Parfait jars, as well as all manner of preserving paraphernalia. But if you're not such a person, they're a great place to induct you to the world of preserving.

However, a quick word on lids. For what its worth, I'd suggest you check your jar lids over before you get going, and give them a sniff to make sure they weren't previously stopping up a jar of strong-smelling pickle or somesuch.  That'd surely ruin your jam.  You can always go all WI and traditional with wax discs and plastic or cloth tops, but I've never done that so cannot advise (though I'm sure Google and Pam can).  So check the lids and if in doubt, buy some new ones.


Strawberry jam
Based on a recipe from River Cottage Handbook No.2: Preserves by Pam Corbin
Makes 6 medium jars (about 1.6kg of jam)

1kg strawberries, stalks removed and large ones halved or quartered
500g granulated sugar (or a mix of sugars: I used half soft brown and half granulated)
450g jam sugar (sugar with pectin in it)
150ml lemon juice (which worked out to be three large lemons' worth)

You will also need:
A maslin pan, or similar high-sided heavy duty pan.  It has to be really big to allow for the jam to boil up to at least double its own depth
A sugar thermometer or electronic meat thermometer: I used to use the big glass type, and after two broke, I now use my electronic meat thermometer
6 or 7 washed, dried and sterilised jars and lids (I always prepare more jars than I think I'll need, just in case)
A jam funnel is very handy and prevents too much jam getting on the worktop
A small ladle for transferring jam to jar
A few wet cloths on hand for spills
Sticky labels

1. Before you start on the jam wash and sterilise your jars in either a low oven or the dishwasher. Wash the lids and/or kilner jar rings.
2. With all of the above kit to hand, get going with the jam. Use a potato mash to squish down 200g of fruit with 200g granulated sugar in the jam pan.  Slowly bring the squished fruit to a simmer and stir around a bit to dissolve the sugar.
3. Add the rest of the fruit and carry on simmering gently until the fruit soften.  This should take about 5 minutes, maybe a bit longer.
4. Add the sugars to the warm fruit and stir slowly, enough to encourage the sugar to dissolve but not so much as to break up the fruit.  Reminisce about who used to make jam in your house and immerse yourself in the smell of your childhood.
5.  When the sugar has dissolved, add the lemon juice, being careful not to drop in any pips, but don't worry too much about lemon flesh.  As an aside, having forgotten to buy lemons when I got the strawbs I toyed with the idea of using bottled lemon juice for the recipe, and then swiftly told myself off for contemplating such a thing.  But I suspect that it would have been Jif lemon that would have made it into the Inverness vintage back in the 80s so I'm not convinced I would have ruined the jam had I given in to my slovenly instincts.  But I went back out and bought lemons, just in case.
6. Increase the heat under the pan, and let the jam come up to a full rolling boil.  This is where a massive pan is essential or else you'll have boiling jam all over your cooker.  If I remember correctly, my Gran made hers in the pressure cooker pan (no lid, obviously) which was a brilliantly heavy gauge steel and perfect for jam.  I now have a maslin pan (thanks Mum!), but my stock pot has also been put to use for preserves before.  It just has to be deep enough to allow the jam to bubble up as much as twice its depth.  If you look closely in the photos, my jam was originally sitting at 1.6l mark, and bubbled up to just under  the 5l line.
7. Let the jam boil for about 10 minutes.

Then comes the science bit.  Setting point is an elusive stage around which much cooking lore has been written.  Tales of cold saucers, jam "flaking" off wooden spoons and skins forming all confuse me and I never seem to get them right. I think my marmalades have set in the past because I pretty much boiled all hell out of them, almost to the point of burning (but I do love the burnt sugar taste that imparts).  If you don't have a sugar or electronic thermometer, I'm going to back away at this point and tell you to buy Pam's book, or find another resource that'll go into the mysteries of setting points.  However, if you do have a thermometer then we're back in business.

Once the jam has boiled in its lava-like guise for a good 10 minutes, check the temperature. If it's already at 104.5°C then you're there.  If not, let it continue to cook until it gets to that point, and then take it off the heat.
8. At this point your jam probably has a mass of pink foamy scum on it.  I like the scum, and its this that my granny skimmed off and let me eat.   Some gentle stirring usually disperses these bubbles (for that is what they are: its not scum like stock scum, it's just air bubbles from the vigorous boiling).  You can - and I do - drop a little bit of butter into the pan to help this disperse.  No idea why this works, probably something to do with fat rupturing the air bubble surface or something. Or you can skim it off, or you can leave it.  Choice is yours (but it does taste rather good on a bit of bread.  Cook's treat).
9.  Now is the time for the jars.  However you've sterilised them, they should be warm as this point.  Decant the hot jam into the pots, filling them almost to the top and seal immediately. Have some damp cloths to hand to minimise the drama of hot jam running over the tops of jars/into your cooker/down the worktop.  If you are left with not-quite-a-jar's-worth at the end, either put it in a jar anyway, but use it first, or keep it in a bowl in the fridge and eat in the next couple of days.

Leave your jars to cool then label them up with what's inside and when you made it. Revel in the delights of feeling like a 50s housewife.

I'm still revelling in all the fresh spring vegetables and eating a lot of green things.  I also had a weekend fuelled by alcohol, cheese and canapes at the wedding of two amazing friends, followed by a mixed up day of hungover eating so felt the need to eat something simple, clean and healthy today.

This is possibly the simplest soup ever, and tastes damn good. Pretty quick too, about half an hour all in.

Green garlic, spinach and new potato soup
Serves 4
Cooking and prep time: 30 minutes

1 onion, finely chopped
1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
400g new potatoes, washed and diced
150g spinach, washed and roughly chopped
2 sticks of spring-onion-shaped green garlic, finely sliced (or one small bulb if that's how it comes where you buy yours)
Creme fraiche, Greek yogurt or soft goats cheese to serve (optional)

1. Fry the onion gently in a little oil.
2. Add the potatoes and stock and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes until the potatoes are cooked.
3. Use a stick blender to break up the potatoes.  Clearly, you could use a real blender if you want, but it's too much washing up for me when I'm not too bothered about a perfect silky texture.  All you need to do is break down the potatoes to thicken the stock, I don't think it matters if there's a few lumpy bits left.
4. Add the green garlic and spinach and cook for about 5 minutes more until the spinach has wilted.
5. Serve as it is, or with a dollop of Greek yogurt, creme fraiche or even a blob of soft goat's cheese.  I still have some onion flowers kicking about the salad drawer (they seem to last ages in the fridge) so I sprinkled a few on mainly to look pretty, but they do taste great and their oniony tang fits right in with this soup.

I'm a staunch supporter of eating with the seasons, but that's not to say I aways find it easy.  After so many months of root veg and good-for-you greens like cabbage and kale, I was genuinely excited to see the first crops of spring and summer vegetables slowly rear their heads in the vegetable section of the Farm Direct website.  Onion flowers popped up there last week as part of the new seashore and foraged selection and were completely new to me.  They are incredibly vibrant and pungent, similar to ransom flowers but packing even more of an allium punch.  They're great sprinkled over risottos and pasta, or at the very end of a stir-fry, or with wilted greens.

Tonight's dinner was a celebration of a selection of the new and exciting, perhaps more honestly known as what's-left-in-the-fridge-at-the-end-of-the-week, but is none the worse for being a bit of a makeshift supper.




1 onion, sliced
2 beef tomatoes (or any selection of tomatoes), approx 1kg, roughly chopped
Slug of white wine
Spaghetti or other pasta of your choice, enough for two
Half a bulb or one spring-onion-esque stick of green garlic, sliced finely
Small handful of basil leaves, torn
150g tub of goats cheese
Rapeseed oil to drizzle
Onion flowers to scatter on top

1. Fry the onion until soft.
2. Add the roughly chopped tomatoes and the wine and let the sauce cook down for about 30 minutes to an hour, depending how much juice the tomatoes have. It will thicken but I'd suggest you don't reduce it too much or you'll lose the summery vibe.  If your tomatoes came on a vine, add that to the sauce and fish it out before serving.  It will impart even more tomatoey flavour to the sauce.
3. About after 30 minutes cooking the sauce, cook the pasta.  You don't me me to tell you how to do that.
4.  When the pasta is cooked, drain and catch a little of the pasta water.
5. Add the green garlic to the tomatoes and stir round, taste the sauce and add any seasoning you think you need.
6. Add a good few spoonfuls of the sauce to the pasta, tossing around over a very low heat to allow the pasta to soak up some tomato juice.  Add the torn basil leaves and toss about a bit more.
7. Divide the pasta and sauce between plates, and add spoonfuls of goats cheese, a sprinkling of onion flowers and a drizzle of rapeseed oil.

This is one of the recipes I learned at Ashburton, slightly tweaked to make a more substantial lunch (and without the use of an oven or grill. Mine is on the blink). It might look and sound like a lot of work for lunch, but if you are judicious in your use of pans and not averse to a bit of microwaving, what appears to be a horrible faff of a juggling act is just an exercise in timing. If the greens (as well as the potatoes) are leftovers, it becomes even easier. As much as I love feeling indulgent eating stuff like this for lunch, I have my limits: I very much doubt I wouldn't ever cook potatoes specially for this, and replace that layer of carb with toast or a muffin, or even a little bed of leftover rice.

Smoked haddock with gruyere and chard
Serves 1
This is an assembly job and a matter of doing a  few things at once, but nothing too strenuous.  IT is only lunchtime after all. If your greens are already cooked, you've got even less to do.  Hurrah!


Small handful leftover boiled new potatoes, sliced into cm thick rounds
Large handful of spinach, chard or other greens, washed, drained and roughly chopped
100g piece of smoked haddock
30g (or about 4-5 skinny slices) gruyere or other melty cheese that you like.  Comte would be good I think
A little milk
An egg

1. First, put the slices of cheese into a little dish or lipped sideplate and pour over enough milk to cover te slices.  Set that to one side.
2. Cook your haddock.  Normally, I'd grill it, but being without grill, I microwaved it (covered with clingfilm and with a splash of water on the plate) for 2 minutes, then fried it alongside the potatoes. So if you're doing things my way, heat a little oil in a frying pan and add your potatoes. Microwave the haddock, then add that to the pan really to crisp up a little bit and look slightly less anaemic and wet.
[By the by, I'm going through a  bit of a rapeseed oil phase.  It's a rich sunny yellow and a mild grassy flavour and seems to be good for almost everything. Probably a bit expensive to fill a fryer with, but other than that, an excellent store cupboard addition.  I used rapeseed here.]
3. While the haddock is frying gently, get the greens wilting in the microwave too.  Same idea: little bit of water and clingfilm, so they steam quickly.
4.  While the greens are cooking, get a pan of water on for your egg.  I poached mine, but I often chicken out (sorry) as my poached eggs are seriously hit and miss.  A soft boiled egg would also be lovely.
5. Give the greens a stir through after a minute or so, keeping an eye on your egg water.
6. Get your grill on or locate your blowtorch.  Yes, blowtorch.  My grill is out of action along with the sparky oven, and I might love teh microwave for many things, but I wasn't about to nuke the whole dish just to melt the cheese, so I got my blowtorch out, okay?
7. Cook your egg.  Put a timer on for the right time (I'd go 3 and half boiled, 4 poached) so you don;t forget and either end up with a hard egg (is there a greater crime?) or forget to eat it altogether, as I almost did, hence the eggless photo above.
8. Start plating up while your egg cooks: a layer of potato, then squeezed out greens, then haddock. Drain the milk off the gruyere (if you happen to be making haddock soup with the rest of your haddock, stick the cheesy milk in that pan!) and lay the slice across the haddock.  Soaking the cheese makes it go lovely and soft and even more melty.
9. Grill  - or blowtorch - your cheese into melty submission.
10. Remember your egg and place that artistically atop your haddock tower.

The cuttlefish that I beat in Donna versus the cuttlefish did not deploy its inky defences in vain.  This was my first time filleting and cooking the beastie, and I turned to the Med for inspiration.  I had in mind a cross between the tender richness of pork cooked in red wine, and a taste of Spain and Portugal, where they love this mollusc. There seems to be two options available with cuttlefish, as with squid and octopus: long and slow or fast and high. Slow cooking transforms it into a tender, yielding mouthful, high and fast gives a crispy finish without any rubberiness.  Slightly daunted by quite how much cuttlefish I had on my hands,  I took the long, slow route for my inaugural cuttlefish recipe.

I was happy with how this turned out, although I've reduced the amount of wine in the recipe below as the version I made was a touch too rich.  I made it with red wine, but I think white would also work very well, perhaps with some small new potatoes in place of the haricot beans.  We ate it with polenta the first night, and sourdough the second, and being quite bland carbs both worked well given the richness of the sauce.

This was worth the mess of preparing the cuttlefish and I think I'll fry it up calamari/salt and pepper squid-style next time, with some aioli on the side.  Being lucky enough to get it so fresh, I'll definitely get it again and try it the fast way. I think it'd be a fantastic snack for a crowd, or a very greedy dinner for two or three along, munched in the sunshine with a cold beer or a bone-dry sherry.

Cuttlefish braised in wine
Serves 4
Prep: 25mins
Cooking time: 2.5 hours
You will need a large casserole or saucepan with a lid

1 cuttlefish weighing approximately 1.5kg, cleaned and prepared
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic
2tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
200ml red or white wine
1x400g tin/carton tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato puree
Bay leaf
Haricot beans (either 140g dried, and then cooked according to packet instructions, or 2 x 400g tins)
Zest of ¼ lemon
Juice of half a lemon
Handful of chopped parsley

1. Cut the cuttlefish body into 2cm chunks. Cut the larger tentacles in half and leave smaller ones whole.

2. Fry the onion gently in oil for 5-10 minutes until it’s soft, but don’t let it brown too much.

3. Add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes.

4. When the garlic has softened, add the cuttlefish pieces to the pan along with the paprika and oregano.
5. Pour in the wine and increase the heat to burn off some of the alcohol. Add the tomatoes and puree and give everything a good stir round. The cuttlefish should be covered with liquid so that it gently braises and doesn’t dry out. Depending on the size of your pan, you may need to add a little extra water to keep the cuttlefish covered in liquid while it cooks.

6. Add the bay leaf and a little salt and pepper and bring to a very gentle simmer.

7. Place the lid on the pan and turn the heat down very low and gently simmer for 2 hours. Check on the liquid level half way through the cooking time and top up with a little water if needed. The liquid should not be bubbling, just very gently blipping away to itself.

8. After two hours, the cuttlefish should be tender and yielding. Add the haricot beans and cook for another 30 minutes, uncovered to let the sauce reduce slightly. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if needed.

9. Just before serving, stir through the lemon zest and juice, and the parsley.

Serve with polenta or mashed potatoes, or just some crusty bread to dunk in and mop up the sauce.

P.S. This recipe also appears on the Farm Direct website and is hopefully the first of many!

Some facts about cuttlefish:

1. Along with octopus and squid, cuttlefish are classed as molluscs 
2. Traditionally, sepia ink is derived from cuttlefish ink
3. Cuttlefish have three hearts.

 First things first, grasp the head firmly just behind its eyes and pull.  Hard.
The head should pop off, leaving a trail of innards.  Scoop these out as best you can and discard them.
Put the head to one side while you tackle the body.  If you can stop staring at its eyes.....
Inside the body is the cuttlebone, most usually seen in a budgie's cage.  I couldn't get it to "just pop out" so made a little incision in the rounded pointy part of the body, where I could feel the end of the bone.  I could then get my fingers round the end of it and pulled it out.
More fun cuttlefish facts: the cuttlebone gives the cuttlefish buoyancy, is made of aragonite and has been known to be used by jewellers who whittle moulds used to cast small objects.

Fun facts over.  Cuttlebone out, there's a beak to remove from the tentacle end.  If Alien gives you nightmares, you may want to look away now....

Still with me?  Okay, you need to squeeze this sucker out by pushing upwards from underneath.  Makes sense when you try to do it, I promise.  Seeing the beak emerge is freaky and satisfying in equal measures.  Once it pops right up, pull it off and discard.

I used the garden tap to rinse the tentacle end off, and had the body in a bucket of water at my side.  Very, very inky water.
So now you need to take the tentacles away from the head, and then chop them up.

First, slice off the two fish-catching long tentacles off near the body and put them to one side.  This is the start of your "good bits" collection.



Then use your eye to judge where the meaty tentacles end and the body begins and slice through to separate the tentacles (which you're keeping) from the eyes and head (which you're not).
Chuck away the head and give the tentacles a good wash so you can see what you're doing. Separate the tentacles into bite sized chunks, adding them to your good pile.  Run your finger over the suckers to find the particularly large hard rings that support the big suckers, and chuck them.  Don't worry too much about the small ones, they magically disappear when you cook the fish (or get soft, or something...I didn't find myself picking out what feels like contact lenses from the stew I made, so one way or another, they don't pose a problem).

So, covered in ink?  Check.  You're not done yet though.  Onwards!

Time to go back to the body.  You now need to take the wings off the body, and the thick membrane-y skin from everything.

Again, I couldn't get the wings to just "pop off" by bending them backwards towards each other (maybe this is easier on smaller cuttlefish?) so used my filleting knife to start me off.  Once I'd cut between the skin and flesh, it was easy to run my fingers along and separate the wings from the body.

Do the same to remove the other wing.
Use a clean tea towel (and having washed it twice to try in vain to get rid of the fishy smell and staining of the ink, one you're not especially fond of) to grasp the skin in one hand, and pull the white flesh away with your other.
Use the same tea towel stripping technique to remove the skin from the body of the cuttlefish.
There be a few bits of membrane left on the body, so use your finger to slide between the membrane and body.  The membrane is quite tough when cooked, so the more you remove, the more tender the cooked cuttlefish will be.
Revert to the knife for tricky or tough bits and to trim any bits round the edges you're not sure about.  But that's it, you're done!  And I'd wager, pretty inky!