This year has been a bumper harvest of my little Victoria plum tree, the one that is happy to grow in our north facing blip of a garden, in the heaviest clay soil you'll ever have seen.
Last year there were 14 plums. This year... Too many to count. So what to do with them all? Well, while I consider, I harvest as they get ripe, halve them and put them in small freezer bags to keep my options open. I like plum cake, and the portion size is sufficient for a nice big cake.
But I think we may have more than we need for cake, so this year I'm planning to dig out a nice German recipe for Pflaumenmus (plum compote.. well sort of, it doesn't translate well, I've seen it translated as plum cheese, but there's nothing cheesy about it). In fact, there's plenty of German plum recipes, I'm sure plum/damson cake is omnipresent in German bakeries, with the fair accompaniment of wasps who seem to like plums as much as we do.
Plum compote is a bit like jam, just with less sugar and longer boiling at lower temperature, and the addition of spices which make it perfect for winter days.
3 kg plums
500 g jam sugar
1 unwaxed lemon, cut the rind into strips
2 cinnamon sticks
ground ginger, cloves or all spice to taste
Wash, halve and remove stones. Put into a casserole dish and sprinkle with spices (cinnamon, cloves etc). Add sugar and stir. Put into preheated oven at 175 degrees C for at least 1.5 hours (stir after every half hour), and put a wooden spoon in the oven door to allow the water to evaporate. The mousse is done when the plums have disintegrated, the water evaporated and the compote is nice and dark. You may need to extend the time in the oven up to 2.5 hours. Fill into sterilised jars and close.
(How to sterilise jars: wash them in hot water, and put the wet jars into the oven for 15 minutes at about 100-150 degrees. You can also boil them in a large saucepan for 10 minutes, or use a baby bottle steriliser if you have one. Sterilising reduces the likelihood of mould developing).
You can use the mouse just like jam, or bake with it or...
Mummy do that!
Showing posts with label recipe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recipe. Show all posts
Monday, 1 September 2014
Saturday, 7 November 2009
Buttermilk Bean Soup
I'm cringing as I type the title. Some things can't be translated, they sound so very wrong.
A few weeks ago, when I was in a reminiscent mood, I remembered one of my favourite childhood dishes. As it happened to be a dish from the Rhineland I thought it would be a good idea to cook it and bring some sense of culinary biculturalism into our home. Not that eating a dish from the Rhineland would encourage Cubling to suddenly speak fluent German of course. But every little helps, and valuing the minority culture in small and different ways is something that is proven to aid bilingualism.
I'm not a great cook, never actually have cooked this dish and with the general evening rush, I'm hard pushed to try out something new. Today was the day though, the inauguration of buttermilk bean soup, Buttermilchbohnensuppe. I cooked it reminiscing about the person who cooked me this tasty and unusual dish. It was our landlady, who lived in the flat below us, bringing up her grandson, only 2 years younger than me. We were close. I played with the grandson, he was the brother I never had. They had money and he had lots of toys. Boys' toys, which I loved to play with. And his granny was born and bred in the Rhineland, unlike us blow-ins. She spoke in dialect. She was a strong woman with a hard hand, and yet with a childish sense of humour. In the summer, when the paddling pool was brought out, she filled it with the hose, trying to catch me on the balcony upstairs, giggling like mad at my futile attempts to hide from the ice cold water and a 65 year olds perfect aim.
Every Sunday, she had her family over for lunch (which is dinnertime in Germany). She would always send up the desert. Occasionally, she'd cook Rhinish specialties, and again, she would send a portion up for me to eat. I loved her food beyond words. Her apple pancake was divine, so were her deserts, cakes and, yes, you guessed it, buttermilk bean soup.
My parents stayed in the flat on her behest, she had asked us if we would stay for as long as she lived. She never increased the rent, my mum did her daily shopping, I cleaned the staircase for some pocket money. I walked her dog, we fed our food leftovers to him. She had parties we came to and we had parties she came to. We saw her every single day, had endless chats, and there is so much detail of her flat that I remember, the photo of her dead husband, the old fashioned furniture that I admired. My parents moved a year or so after she had passed away, after I'd already moved to Ireland/Scotland.
I remember I'd asked her to write down the recipie for buttermilk bean soup. She never did. Maybe she didn't have one. So, tonight, I made it up myself, with a little help from the internet:
Rhineland Buttermilk Bean Soup
boil 500g of poatoes, mash with milk and a very generous portion of butter
fry an onion (I'm not sure if the original has onion, but I like onion so there you go)
sautee 300g-500g of green beans
Add one cube of vegetable stock to the mashed potatoes, then the onions and 1l of buttermilk, enough so that they are quite runny. Add the beans.
After adding the buttermilk, don't boil the soup, only heat very gently because buttermilk curdles when boiled - the taste will be the same, but it won't look as good.
You may vary the quantities, I only guessed them. You can add a tub of cream if you like. Season to taste.
Enjoy, a very healthy, easy, cheap and nutritious soup. And vegetarian too!
A few weeks ago, when I was in a reminiscent mood, I remembered one of my favourite childhood dishes. As it happened to be a dish from the Rhineland I thought it would be a good idea to cook it and bring some sense of culinary biculturalism into our home. Not that eating a dish from the Rhineland would encourage Cubling to suddenly speak fluent German of course. But every little helps, and valuing the minority culture in small and different ways is something that is proven to aid bilingualism.
I'm not a great cook, never actually have cooked this dish and with the general evening rush, I'm hard pushed to try out something new. Today was the day though, the inauguration of buttermilk bean soup, Buttermilchbohnensuppe. I cooked it reminiscing about the person who cooked me this tasty and unusual dish. It was our landlady, who lived in the flat below us, bringing up her grandson, only 2 years younger than me. We were close. I played with the grandson, he was the brother I never had. They had money and he had lots of toys. Boys' toys, which I loved to play with. And his granny was born and bred in the Rhineland, unlike us blow-ins. She spoke in dialect. She was a strong woman with a hard hand, and yet with a childish sense of humour. In the summer, when the paddling pool was brought out, she filled it with the hose, trying to catch me on the balcony upstairs, giggling like mad at my futile attempts to hide from the ice cold water and a 65 year olds perfect aim.
Every Sunday, she had her family over for lunch (which is dinnertime in Germany). She would always send up the desert. Occasionally, she'd cook Rhinish specialties, and again, she would send a portion up for me to eat. I loved her food beyond words. Her apple pancake was divine, so were her deserts, cakes and, yes, you guessed it, buttermilk bean soup.
My parents stayed in the flat on her behest, she had asked us if we would stay for as long as she lived. She never increased the rent, my mum did her daily shopping, I cleaned the staircase for some pocket money. I walked her dog, we fed our food leftovers to him. She had parties we came to and we had parties she came to. We saw her every single day, had endless chats, and there is so much detail of her flat that I remember, the photo of her dead husband, the old fashioned furniture that I admired. My parents moved a year or so after she had passed away, after I'd already moved to Ireland/Scotland.
I remember I'd asked her to write down the recipie for buttermilk bean soup. She never did. Maybe she didn't have one. So, tonight, I made it up myself, with a little help from the internet:
Rhineland Buttermilk Bean Soup
boil 500g of poatoes, mash with milk and a very generous portion of butter
fry an onion (I'm not sure if the original has onion, but I like onion so there you go)
sautee 300g-500g of green beans
Add one cube of vegetable stock to the mashed potatoes, then the onions and 1l of buttermilk, enough so that they are quite runny. Add the beans.
After adding the buttermilk, don't boil the soup, only heat very gently because buttermilk curdles when boiled - the taste will be the same, but it won't look as good.
You may vary the quantities, I only guessed them. You can add a tub of cream if you like. Season to taste.
Enjoy, a very healthy, easy, cheap and nutritious soup. And vegetarian too!
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