Saturday, June 20, 2009
A very English dessert
That's Rick Stein's rhubarb crumble.
Last Saturday I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures - Saturday Morning Kitchen - when up popped Rick Stein cooking rhubarb crumble. As it happens, I have a rather large rhubarb patch in the garden her, and I'd quite fond of rhubarb crumble, so I paid him a little more attention than I might have for another recipe (I normally watch/listen to the programme while doing something else, like calligraphy or embroidery). His recipe was a new approach; rather than stew the rhubarb first, simply chop it up and put it in the bottom of a dish, add sugar to taste and a little flour to thicken the eventual fruit mixture, then cover with crumble mixture. That, I thought, would be a nice easy thing to try at some point.
'Some point' came today. This afternoon some of the shire came over for sausage-making, fencing and dinner. There was also supposed to be some gaming thrown in there but things started about three hours later than planned and sausage-making is not a quick task. We worked out that it takes six people to make a link of sausages - one to hold the stuffer, one to pay out the sausage skin, one to turn the stuffer's handle, one to add sausage mixture to the stuffer, one to force the mixture in the stuffer down into its depths and one to take the length of sausage created and twist it into triple-links of sausage (which was my job). I know it can be done with two people but it's so much easier, if not necessarily more efficient, to do it with six.
Before we got our hands messy with the sausages, though, we had a preparatory chocolate raisin muffin. E made these, baking chocolate muffins that contained chocolate-coated raisins (as opposed to chocolate chunks) and were covered with more chocolate. Mnom indeed.
Dinner was a variation on my standard chicken and leek soup - this time we added eggs to it in an attempt to get the nice thin strings of egg that you sometimes get in chinese soups. The extra protein was especially welcome after an hour or so of fencing. This was followed by the rhubarb crumble and custard. On a 'filling' rating of 1-10 this scored a 9. I'd put a little two much sugar on the rhubarb so it wasn't as tart as I prefer it but that made it a little more suited to the taste of my Icelandic friends. It was a big success, and I doubt that I'll evergo back to stewing rhubarb after that.
There's some left, which I suspect we'll have for breakfast tomorrow. Although I don't think I'll do custard with it. I just happen to have a carton of cream in the fridge, and I'm sure that would be far more suitable for breakfast.
Last Saturday I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures - Saturday Morning Kitchen - when up popped Rick Stein cooking rhubarb crumble. As it happens, I have a rather large rhubarb patch in the garden her, and I'd quite fond of rhubarb crumble, so I paid him a little more attention than I might have for another recipe (I normally watch/listen to the programme while doing something else, like calligraphy or embroidery). His recipe was a new approach; rather than stew the rhubarb first, simply chop it up and put it in the bottom of a dish, add sugar to taste and a little flour to thicken the eventual fruit mixture, then cover with crumble mixture. That, I thought, would be a nice easy thing to try at some point.
'Some point' came today. This afternoon some of the shire came over for sausage-making, fencing and dinner. There was also supposed to be some gaming thrown in there but things started about three hours later than planned and sausage-making is not a quick task. We worked out that it takes six people to make a link of sausages - one to hold the stuffer, one to pay out the sausage skin, one to turn the stuffer's handle, one to add sausage mixture to the stuffer, one to force the mixture in the stuffer down into its depths and one to take the length of sausage created and twist it into triple-links of sausage (which was my job). I know it can be done with two people but it's so much easier, if not necessarily more efficient, to do it with six.
Before we got our hands messy with the sausages, though, we had a preparatory chocolate raisin muffin. E made these, baking chocolate muffins that contained chocolate-coated raisins (as opposed to chocolate chunks) and were covered with more chocolate. Mnom indeed.
Dinner was a variation on my standard chicken and leek soup - this time we added eggs to it in an attempt to get the nice thin strings of egg that you sometimes get in chinese soups. The extra protein was especially welcome after an hour or so of fencing. This was followed by the rhubarb crumble and custard. On a 'filling' rating of 1-10 this scored a 9. I'd put a little two much sugar on the rhubarb so it wasn't as tart as I prefer it but that made it a little more suited to the taste of my Icelandic friends. It was a big success, and I doubt that I'll evergo back to stewing rhubarb after that.
There's some left, which I suspect we'll have for breakfast tomorrow. Although I don't think I'll do custard with it. I just happen to have a carton of cream in the fridge, and I'm sure that would be far more suitable for breakfast.