Jottage from Lancaster - Cooking from an App Part 2

My chosen meal for tonight was sea trout in sorrel sauce. Although I am a fish novice, even I worked out that the trout I bought wasn't sea trout, but I thought that it was some kind of trout, so that would be OK. I also remembered that on a tour of the field one rare sunny and dry day I had spotted some sorrel. So far so good. So then all I had to do is to try getting it right using the app.


First of all a trip into the field, which was still covered with a layer of rather large hailstones, even though the sun was shining encouragingly. The sorrel is still there in abundance, but looking more closely at it, it seemed to be a bit the worse for wear. I pulled out decent handfuls of the stuff and brought it into the kitchen, only to find that I had brought in a lot of grass with it, and when I weighed what was left I had about 20g of the stuff - some of which seemed as if it had half eaten by some creature that wasn't interested at all in having it with sea trout.

Only 20g of sorrel

I needed an egg yolk and a tablespoonful of cream so, in the interests of being economical I used the egg white and another egg, as well as the rest of the cream, to make ice cream. I make ice cream all the time in little individual pots. This gets round the difficulty of getting enough for one serving without defrosting the lot. And it gets round paying a vast amount of money for something which is just an egg or 2, a bit of sugar and some cream. What costs me just over £1 to make would be nearer £5 in the shops.

Home made ice cream churning

I cooked what I learnt from the packet was rainbow trout and made up the sorrel sauce, albeit with only 20g of sorrel instead of 100g or so. This was a mistake as in the end it really needed a stronger sorrel flavour but getting more of the stuff seemed too difficult. It just may be that when the weather gets a bit warmer there will be more it. And I think I may pick some for salads if it does begin a spring growth spurt. But I had come to the end of the app recipe and unlike last night, I didn't have any ingredients left over. What I did have was a thick and creamy sorrel-y sauce over some nice succulent fish. But next time I will follow the recipe and put much more sorrel in. 

Jottage from Lancaster - Tunisian Lamb With Aubergine

Of course I have the River Cottage app. I resisted for a while but then in a fit of indulgence I bought it. I often flick through the recipes but until now I haven't actually made any of them. But returning from a short trip down south I began browsing them half way up the M5 and by the time we were past Birmingham I had a few ideas for meals for the next week and I had even written a shopping list ready for what is becoming a regular off-motorway stop at Waitrose in Sandbach.

So armed with my list I bought everything I needed and along with unpacking from our Easter weekend away I had several bags of fruit, veg, lamb and fish.


I was looking forward to this Tunisian lamb and was rather smug about having all the right spices and indeed all the right ingredients down to the almonds and apricots. But alas, I found that making something from an app isn't as easy as I thought it would be. For a start you have to keep dodging back between the ingredients list and the what-to-do bit and this was confusing enough. And somehow it just wasn't as easy to work out what to do when. 


I browned the lamb and didn't take it out of the pan before adding the onions and garlic. I knew that this was I normally did, but I didn't actually see it on the instructions - at least not until it was too late. Then I couldn't work out when to add the aubergines so I just tossed them into the pan at the end. Or, not quite the end. When I had decided it was all finished I remembered that it had apricots and almonds in somewhere. I was sure that I hadn't seen anything about them anywhere. Only when it had all been merrily bubbling away did I realise that I hadn't scrolled far enough down the ingredients list and I hadn't read to the end of the instructions. Here was the missing Aubergine bit at last, but it was all too late.

So I had all the right ingredients but did all the wrong things with them. But amazingly enough, it's turned out really well. I'm going to add some cous cous and serve it up tonight. There's actually enough for a few night but tomorrow we are having fish from another app recipe. I might take the time to read it all through carefully before I start it this time.



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Jottage from Lancaster - Tristan and Amelia's birthday

We went to Cambridge for Tristan's first birthday party which Heather has written about in her own Jottage. Tristan shares a birthday with his cousin, Amelia who was 3, and the celebrations were for her too. By the time we came down to the kitchen on the morning of the party for breakfast, Heather had already put the oven on and was busy preparing the last minute salad and cycled off to the supermarket to buy the final oddments. It was clear she had thought through the menu in some detail, and we were both musing on the difference that River Cottage had made to both our lives  which was so obvious when you looked at the table groaning with made-from-scratch food.


Of course the chocolate cake disaster was the one cloud on the horizon. The birthday cake should be the centre piece of the table, but it was pushed to the back so that perhaps no one would notice just how it hadn't risen. I can't explain why it went to wrong, but in the event the flat cake with candles was mostly eaten (although Amelia didn't actually eat hers, she was the only one). To my dismay, Ethan, who is almost 6 did comment on how flat it was but no one else said a word. 


The original Mary Berry cake, which had been crammed into a plastic box, was brought out later in the afternoon and picked at in small pieces by everyone. It was the nicer textured cake by far, but the geometrical problems made it rather unattractive (burnt and flattish on one side, well-risen on the other, and about 10 percent of it stuck to the budget-priced silicone cake mould). I had layered it with a tin of mandarins and soaked it in the juice then topped it with Greek yoghurt, which actually wasn't bad at all.

The cake, adapted for Amelia's 3rd birthday with a new centre candle

So now the birthday is over and I have a pinto bean chilli cooking on the stove - one of my favourite feel-good recipes from River Cottage Veg. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Heather wasn't already planning next year's celebrations!

Jottage from Cambridge - Tristan’s First Birthday Party!

A lot has happened over the past year. The most wonderful thing has been watching my son grow up from being the tiniest dot to a little boy on the verge of walking and, although not quite comprehensible, capable of babbling out consonants. But over the past twelve months, and particularly throughout the six that I have been weaning Tristan, I have discovered what can be done with herbs and spices, I have made pastry, pasties and soups, created mountains of whoopie pies and gone from eating chicken kievs every other week to never going near the ready-made food aisle in the supermarket. The blender, ice-cream maker, yogurt maker and breadmaker, once tidily packed away in their boxes on top of the cupboards, are now always accessible on the counter. My cookery books, and especially those written by Hugh, are now tired-looking and splattered with colourful spills and blobs. Of course I have had the time to cook as I’m not getting home from work exhausted and hungry but it is certainly true that, with Tristan’s arrival, I have wanted to be more creative in the kitchen. 

I had been planning Tristan’s birthday feast for a month at least – anxious that I had six adults, two children and one baby to feed and wanting to show-off a bit. Last year I would probably have chosen a selection of sandwiches, shop-bought quiches and sausage rolls but, with experience to hand, I decided to try and make everything from scratch. The results are shown in the picture below: Chicken and Leek Pasties (River Cottage Everyday), Couscous Salad with Peppers and Feta (River Cottage Veg), Salmon Tart (Ainsley Harriott), and a piece of gammon. Of course nothing was difficult to make (or very expensive) but I thought the spread looked as if some thought had put into it and that, more than anything, I felt proud of myself for.

Not a ham sandwich in sight...

There is a little story behind the birthday cake. My mother set to work on a Mary Berry chocolate cake which, alas, got completely stuck in the silicon tray and fell to pieces. The cake was subsequently used as a base for the little desserts with mandarin oranges and Greek yogurt. She made up the recipe for the second attempt which thankfully didn’t stick to the cake tin, but did turn out quite flat. 

Flat (but edible) first birthday cake.

The cake, however, was for a three year old and a one year old who were oblivious to the fact that it was vertically challenged, and it did taste delicious. I can’t imagine yet what the spread for Tristan’s second birthday will be like, but I will certainly keep up the baking and I can’t wait to try out lots of new recipes for us all to enjoy. 

Tristan at a year old