Our damson tree has never been so laden with powdery blue fruits and this year they’ve clumped together like bunches of giant, velvety grapes. Clusters and clusters of them all over the tree. I’m planning to make spiced damson chutney and damson gin but these are barely enough to make dent and so this year there has been jam too – a caramelised boozy jam of damsons and port.

Fingers crossed, this is our last year in our current house (probably, you know how these house moves go – nothing is certain until you get the keys). This also means that it is our last year in our current garden and so I’m especially determined to make good use of our plum, damson and apple trees. I’m a big fan of using freezer compotes as a low sugar way to preserve fruit, but with three fruit trees and one small freezer I’ve had to branch out.

Jam needs its high sugar content to make sure that the jam sets properly and doesn’t spoil and go mouldy in the jar.  Theoretically you can use a little less sugar in damson jam compared with other fruit jams because of the damson’s high pectin content (it should set at a lower concentration), but we’re not talking about eating half the jar as one of your ‘five a day’ here so to my mind what’s more important is a successful afternoon in the kitchen.  Damsons (and plums) are a great place to start out in jam making by the way because of the aforementioned high pectin content – they’re more than likely to set unlike some fussier preserves like strawberry.

My jam is a chunky full fruit preserve which contains the fruit skin but I have also made a batch of a smoother, jelly-esque damson jam.  If you’d like to try the smooth variety you can remove the fruit skin and the stones together in one clever step, bypassing the need to stone the damsons by hand. Boil the fruit and water as per my recipe but before you add the sugar press the fruit through a metal colander, thus retaining the stones and any big bits of fruit.  This bit of kitchen genius comes strangely from unruly haired Mayor of London, Boris Johnson who is also quite right in his promotion of jam making as a unisex activity. “If women can go to work and suffer the curse of ambition, then we men are entitled to the restful consolations of jam-making”.

The damsons go through a riot of colours before settling at a deep, rich burgundy that is nothing like the yellow of the fruit’s flesh or the blue outer.  Having made the jam the boy and I were impatient to try it out the next morning but the end slices of our supermarket granary just didn’t seem proper and so we whisked up a batch of Heidi Swanson’s Easy Little Bread Recipe from 101 Cookbooks. Its short, dense slices would be hopeless for making a sandwich but this slightly sweet, oaten bread was probably designed with homemade jam and a smudge of butter in mind.  And as the title suggests the recipe is really very easy.

Alongside the lush new greens growing in  my garden are some productive older residents including  damson, apple, fig and plum trees. Most of the fruit bounty from the trees is taken care of between eating, passing on to friends and freezing (with just enough sugar). It’s the damsons that need a bit more thought; they are delicious in their own way, but not really all that good eaten au naturel.  

The first batch of purple blue damsons were made into a tub of decadent full fat, cream and sugar ice-cream, courtesy of Nigel Slater. The second batch were destined for Madalene’s Bullace and Conference Pear Breakfast Muffins. And so it turned out were the third batch.  Now before I get on to talking about the muffins, if you haven’t seen it already you should take a look at Madalene’s blog, The British Larder. Her photography is mouth-watering and her recipes are always inspiring me to try out more traditional British produce such as cobnuts, bullace and greengages.

This recipe produces wholesome, unpretentious muffins – the sort you’d have for breakfast or to tide you over until a late dinner.  And there are hidden treasures within the muffins; the damson pieces form little crimson, caramelised nuggets and the cereal flakes become chewy and malty.

My version has a few differences to Madalene’s including vegetable oil (also known as rapeseed or canola oil) for more monounsaturated fats, yogurt with a splash of milk in place of buttermilk (which I can never find to buy), and a touch of allspice (for that autumnal feel).  We don’t tend to have bran flakes in stock so my muffins use an unsweetened cereal flake made from a combination of buckwheat and rice.  Don’t think you can’t try the recipe without access to a supply of damsons either – I’m confident plums would work in their place.

If you’re in the mood for more baking ideas check out this earlier post on How to Make a Healthier Muffin.

We’ve just spent a few days in the glorious highlands of Scotland.  Me with my camera and the triathlete with his bike, taking part in the Caledonian Etape.  Or trying to anyway; the whole weekend turned out to be rather more eventful than planned when somebody sabotaged the event by scattering carpet tacks across the route, possibly in protest at the road closures put in place for the event (scheduled to last an incredibly inconvenient three whole hours).

The Scots as it turns out have a whole vocabulary to describe rain.  After a dreich day, the rain upgraded its status to stotting down. The weather in England hasn’t been much better since we got back from our break (grey and distinctly chilly) so this seems an opportune time to share a crumble recipe.

I’ve dallied with ‘healthier fats’ in crumbles, but haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory recipe (oils seem to produce a dish more rubble than crumble).  A compromise is to accompany the butter with a high fruit to topping ratio, not too much sugar and plenty of good stuff in the topping.  Wholemeal spelt flour, whole oats plus roughly chopped hazelnuts for texture.  Spelt flour has a toasty, nutty flavour and is my current favourite standby flour for all but the most serious of baking recipes.  (Shopping note: as with the unmilled spelt grains, spelt flour comes in wholegrain and white varieties. Check the label to see which sort you are getting).

Our crumble accompaniment tends to start from luxurious, fresh vanilla custard on the first day to a more austere, sour note like natural yogurt or half-fat creme fraiche for the leftovers.

Other recipes featuring oats, plums and spelt
Baked plums with cinnamon and honey
Fig and plum porridge
Butternut squash, oat and ginger cake bites
Summery herb, salmon and spelt salad
Rhubarb and Ginger Thickie

The photo at the top of this post is from Queen’s View, reputably the most photographed view in Perthshire and a favourite of Queen Victoria.

This pavlova is a serious pudding, not a health food.  The meringue is fudgy with brown sugar.  The fruit topping is vanilla and honey scented and textured with fig seeds.  The cream layer is a blend of whipped cream and greek yogurt. It’s really good though, so I thought you wouldn’t mind the brief deviation from all that nutritiousness.

The pavlova was supposed to be the caramel apple pavlova from the Riverford Farm cookbook.  We had friends coming to dinner and I promised myself that I’d stick to the recipe, just this once.  And then when I made the meringue the night before the dinner I figured swapping in a little bit of muscovado sugar couldn’t hurt, but that I’d stick to the plan with the caramel apple topping. And then our friends had to cancel because of the heavy snow we’ve had…

Inspired among other recipes by Stonesoup’s version of Maggie Beer’s fig pavlova I made a winter fruit compote with plums and dried figs, spiced with vanilla, cinnamon, star anise and honey.  A compote based on dried and (gasp!) canned fruit neatly skirts round the problem of the lacklustre fruit available in the UK at this time of year and gives the whole dish a decidedly seasonal feel.  You can use fresh fruit by all means but just think about it; nutritionally you’re not really missing out, it is environmentally sound at this time of year and you won’t be infuriated by fruit that doesn’t ripen in time for your guests.  Mixing whipped cream with a helping of lower-in-fat greek yogurt is a worthwhile twist that gives a contrasting sour note in the middle of all that sweetness.

Frosting and icing
Most of the time my muffins remain topless, but just occasionally a bit of decoration is called for.  A quick, if slightly rustic looking topping is a very thin glaze of icing sugar flavoured with lemon, lime or orange juice.  This isn’t going to add many extra calories at all, though your dentist may not approve.   A far plusher topping is a frosting based on flavoured, low-fat cream cheese.  I frost or ice half of my muffins to share and leave half unadorned to eat later in the week or stash away in the freezer.  Any unfrosted homemade fruity muffins make a great “grab and go” portable breakfast, just take one out of the freezer the night before and it will be ready to eat first thing.

These tweaks should be suitable for experimenting on any muffin recipe of your choice.  I have also put all of the ideas together in one recipe for mango, lime and ginger muffins with a lime cream cheese frosting.

(I couldn’t resist just one picture from my trip to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show on Friday.  There are many more on my Flickr photostream if any of you are horticulturally minded!).

Elsewhere on Mostly Eating
More inspiration for healthy baking, this time with vegetables – Butternut squash, oat and ginger cake bites
Five clever ideas for healthy recipe substitutions includes two baking tips

Muffins galore!
Muffin recipes elsewhere that use similar ideas
Wendy’s Moist Bran Muffins
Wholewheat Apple Muffins from Smitten Kitchen
Jamie Oliver’s Butternut Squash Muffins with a frosty top
Lemon Ginger Muffins from Elise
Kathryn’s Pear, Maple and Walnut Muffins

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I hope you all have a lovely time over the Christmas break. We will be off up North in a couple of days to see both of our families and before that I’m planning a leisurely couple of days wrapping presents and drinking mulled wine. For alongside this I have already made a batch of my favourite Christmas baking treat; sticky golden syrup flapjacks warmed up with a seasonal dollop of mincemeat and a snifter of rum. This recipe is as easy as baking gets and but will still fill your house with a satisfying dose of spicy, fruity Christmas scent.

I tried nutritionify-ing this recipe by leaving out a bit of the butter and golden syrup, but it told me in no uncertain terms that this was not what Christmas cookery was all about by promptly falling apart. I present here the full fat, full sugar, full syrup version to enjoy (normal service will be resumed in January!).

There’s one question that I need to get out of the way quickly before my lovely husband gets any ideas. Yes, these little cakes do have vegetable in them, but no, they don’t count as a portion of veg. I hope I haven’t upset anyone else with that revelation? A portion of veggies you see needs to be at least within shouting distance of 80g, and a slice of carrot cake or any of its culinary siblings come in nowhere near that, not even nutritionist Kathryn’s Chocolate and Beetroot cake or Heidi’s Special Zucchini Bread. These little squash bites are in the same boat – a meagre 12.5g of squash per cake. But don’t worry, it is not so much what you are putting in that is important here, it is what the squash lets you leave out. Here’s the low down on why these are worth firing up the oven:

• Crystallised ginger and butternut squash are the perfect autumn flavour combo
• Roasted butternut squash provides plenty of moisture leaving the recipe to be naturally low fat
• Flour is OK (unless you have coeliac disease), especially wholemeal, but just doesn’t do as much good stuff for you as oats. This recipe is loosely based on the kind of proportions you would use to make muffins but skips half of the flour in favour of low GI, cholesterol busting oats.
• There’s no butter or marg in here, just two tablespoons of rapeseed oil to make twenty cakes. Rapeseed oil is the one also known as vegetable oil or canola and is predominantly monounsaturated like olive oil (indeed you could use a mild olive oil instead if you prefer).
• You won’t miss the butter, I promise, because there are also a handful of buttery macadamia nuts in there.

These are an every day sorta cake. They aren’t particularly pretty or delicate (meaning that you can dunk them in your tea), but they are as nutritionally well balanced as you can expect a cake to be. Like most low fat cakes they don’t keep for too long but this works in their favour – I keep a batch in the freezer and when I fancy something sweet with my tea I take one of these out at breakfast and it is ready to eat by coffee break.
This is an entirely self-invented recipe and I’m not a baking expert by any means; feel free to tweak the recipe and report back on any improvements you come up with! I’m sure you can think of plenty of things to do with the rest of the butternut squash but if not pop it into the freezer for now (I have an easy savoury recipe to use the rest on its way).

My foray into vegetable-based baking coincides with a beta carotene theme for regular blogging event Sugar High Friday so I thought I would take the opportunity to join those guys for a change (the event is hosted this time around by Leslie at Definitely Not Martha). It sounds good so I will put a link to the round-up here when it appears.

Spiced chilli hot chocolate is an idea as old as well, hot chocolate! The earliest traces of hot chocolate, found in Mayan tombs in Guatamala dating back to 460 A.D, had been made from a paste ground from cocoa seeds mixed with cornmeal and chillis. I like this spicy hot chocolate as an occasional mid afternoon pick me up when I am struggling to concentrate on something complicated – there’s definitely something in the research from Nottingham University showing that a cocoa rich drink can improve blood flow to the brain. Chilli is also well known for improving blood flow all over your body so this would be equally welcome to warm you up after a bracing winter walk outside.

Sadly chocolate is not the health food that some clever marketing people would like us to believe (or that we would like to believe perhaps?), but for an occasional sweet treat a mug of hot spicy drinking chocolate is not such a bad thing. Two tips to keep it on the healthy side; first, use good quality plain chocolate rather than a sweetened milk chocolate or chocolate powder and second, use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk to keep this on the low fat side. All chocolate is high in sugar and fat (dark chocolate just has a little bit less fat and a little bit more sugar) and so the health gain in choosing dark (plain chocolate) is not really about fat but is because dark chocolate contains more cocoa solids, usually around the 70%. It is the cocoa solids in chocolate that have been associated with having heart health benefits and that contain valuable anti-oxidants.

If you’ve ever heard nutritionists talking about sugary and sweet foods being empty calories they mean that these foods provide calories but bugger all else of nutritional usefulness. Happily this hot chocolate is well away from being empty calories with those 70% cocoa solids and a good helping of bone healthy calcium in the milk. If you don’t drink cows milk just go for whatever alternative you normally use but try to choose one that has been fortified with calcium.

And now to the all important third tip – for a super enjoyable, guilt-free beverage experience make your drink from tasty fairly traded dark chocolate! Rachel who makes and bakes many lovely things over at Rkhooks is gathering together all of our best chocolate recipes to promote the chocolate campaign from Stop the Traffik. The chocolate campaign is there to draw attention to the shocking practice of using trafficked child slave labour to harvest cocoa beans on the Cote D’Ivoire. The chocolate campaign web site has some information about where to buy your traffik-free chocolate from but essentially for a chocolate to be awarded Fairtrade status it must be guaranteed not to have involved any trafficked labour in its production so you can just look out for fairtrade chocolate.

For the last few weekends I have been a triathlon widow, which has been OK with me because I have had plenty of time to potter about in the kitchen and ponder on what to do with the bounty from our fruit trees.
The usual suspects when it comes to preserving fruit to use through the winter are jams and chutneys. Most years I make plum chutney and I have nothing against a bit of jam but somehow it always seems such a shame to take a super healthy food and to mix it with its weight in sugar. If you want to make your fruit last without adding large quantities of sugar then one answer is to turn it into softly stewed compote and freeze.

Unlike in jam making where the sugar has a central role in preservation, when you freeze fruit the amount of sugar is dictated only by palate, so unless you have a very sweet tooth you can go a lot lower with the sugar than most recipes suggest. I’ve been mulling this over since Heidi’s Plum and Rosewater compote in July (20% sugar to fruit) and more recently Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s article on British plums (25% sugar to fruit) and decided to try my luck at 10% sugar to fruit. This worked out perfectly for my taste buds and is a respectable level of sugar for healthy people to eat as an occasional food (nutrition guidelines suggest that any foods with over 15g of added sugar per 100g be regarded as high in sugar, with 5g or less per 100g considered low).

Despite losing a little bit of certain vitamins compared with eating raw, cooked fruit is a very nutritious food to eat, ‘counting’ towards that five a day while being up there with a ready meal in the convenience stakes. For those of us who like to know these things, a portion of cooked or stewed fruit is three tablespoons. I have a bunch of reusable containers from Lakeland and have frozen my compote in roughly three portion batches so that I can take out one tub a week through the Winter. Our freezer isn’t big enough to store a batch for every week of the Winter but I have stuffed quite a lot in there, largely aided by accidentally leaving the freezer door open a couple of weeks before (I wouldn’t advise this as a strategy, it was quite messy and expensive). There is something very satisfying about having a freezerful of healthy food squirreled away, though as always I’m sure there are pros and cons in the sustainability argument. Freezing fruit will use more energy than traditional preserving methods but for me compote fulfils a completely different space in the diet from jam and I love it that I won’t need to rely so much on imported fruit during the Winter.

I have made two compotes, one from plum and one from apple, but you will probably have your own ideas depending on what fruit you have a glut of or can buy cheaply. I’m pleased with the contrast between these two – one week I will have a gentle, aromatic plum compote perfumed with vanilla and the next week a fresher, chunkier apple compote spiked with a clean rosewater flavour.

You can use the compotes in a myriad of different ways but these are what I have in mind:

• Stirred through hot porridge when the mornings start to turn cold
• Warm or cold alongside low fat organic yogurt as a quick snack or breakfast
• Warmed then poured over a slice of toasted bread or brioche spread with homemade almond butter
• Hot as an accompaniment to custard, rice pudding or ice-cream for a modest pudding
• Blended with milk and yogurt for a quick smoothie or an oat thickie

Neither compote is difficult to make but give yourself an hour each time to allow for prepping the fruit (an easy but repetitive task, fine for doing in front of the TV or in the garden). The apple compote was made from the kind of garden apples that make you wince eaten raw – if you have a sweeter variety you may be able to drop to 5% sugar. Oh and I still have about 100 apples left if anybody has any ideas!

For anybody looking for more general guidelines on freezing a seasonal glut the BBC web site has a good article.

The produce lowest in food miles has to be all of that fabulous fresh stuff so many of you are busy growing in your own back gardens! Lots of people seem to be busy munching through very impressive courgette harvests and there have been some fantastic courgette recipes posted including those from Kalyn, Wendy and Joanna to name just a few. I’m also much enthused by the Royal Horticultural Society’s Grown Your Own Veg site complete with blog, calendar and gardening tips. However, I’m all talk and no trousers because life was too hectic here earlier in the Summer to get round to planting much more than a few herbs. There is no such abundance in our garden, but we are starting to reap the rewards of our lovely fruit trees (oh except the poor pear tree, which the blasted cat has killed by scratching through the bark right the way round the base of the tree).

Least productive in the garden is the fig tree, from which we had two figs across the whole of last Summer. Such a rare treat, these were eaten gratefully and unadorned. But this year we have already had at least ten huge juicy figs, not even counting the four we gave to a neighbour who was waiting patiently when we returned from our holiday to ask politely “did we like figs, and were we planning to eat them?”. We were happy to hand over the current ripe batch, and were rewarded by the promise of a donation from his Muscat grape harvest later in the Summer (not sure if this will be before or after he turns it into homemade wine).

It’s a funny thing having so many figs because frankly it hasn’t been the best Summer here in Oxford (OK, so it has in fact been the worst Summer since records began). But figs work to their own timetable, with the small, hard green fruits on the tree not ripening until the year after their first appearance and I suspect that the bumper harvest owes more to last Summer which was how a Summer ought to behave.

Originally inspired by a recipe for Fig and honey milk shake, every second pair of figs that ripen on our tree are turned into this glorious, turkish delight-scented froth. A little bit more sophisticated than your average smoothie and wonderfully fragrant, I can’t help thinking that this would make a lovely finale to a middle-eastern feast, particularly if it was served in pretty gold-edged Moroccan tea glasses (like the beauties on this Flickr photograph).

On an entirely different note, if you are interested in healthy eating then Kathryn Elliot has recently revamped her Limes and Lycopene blog and very smart it looks too! Throughout August Kathryn is running 31 days to better energy, a daily tip with a fifteen minute task to help you finish the month reinvigorated and raring to go. Having returned from Barcelona with a horrible snotty cold and feeling decidedly bleurgh I will definitely be tuning in!