Grandchildrens Trifle

This tastes good-really good-give it a go

Grandchildren’s Trifle.


This uses up windfalls, fills up itinerant grandchildren, and you can assemble it it minutes.

Ingredients

1carton ready made custard( Vanilla from Waitrose is good)1 jam Swiss roll, Stewed apples-about five large cooking apples, no water, and very little sugar .

Visiting tinies look forward to a pud. The bribery potential is important. I don’t actually say that clean plates are a qualification for afters. I just leave the trifle on the side while they are pushing vegetables around on the plate, and don’t dish it up straight away. Teenage grandchildren seem to need vast amounts of food to be able to function, or even to get up in the morning, and are usually game for an old fashioned fruity, creamy something in a glass dish. This is not normal breakfast food, but what do I care?

. When their parents were tiny, I was producing meals on a very tight budget. I learned how to use apples and onions in the most amazing variety of ways. Onion soup for starters, belly pork with onions and apple sauce, and grandchildren’s trifle for a dessert, was in my view, a balanced meal. If they thought it looked like yesterdays dessert, I put hundreds and thousands on it. But not on the belly pork, obviously.

So, a large glass dish (or several small ones if you are serious about cutting down on the washing up, or one large dish and the requisite number of spoons if you want to be really environmentally friendly), a layer of Swiss roll, tip in the stewed apples, which should be stiff and fairly thick, then slosh on the custard. That is it. Eat it straight away.

I’ve lost memory of origin of the name here. It’s probably gaggles of harassed child minding grandmothers, throwing something together in a marathon of meal making. When it’s easy, cheapish and wolfed down, you produce it again. And pass on the recipe. Mind you, jam Swiss rolls are not always easy to find, and my mothers generation would have balked at a carton of custard.

MrsEarles Chicken( thank you Mrs Earle) and strawberries grown at waist height

Cooking Mrs Earles chicken tonight for our very dear neighbours, the Unsworths, who moved in 6 months before us, 30 years ago.. You get to know people after all that time. For pudding, strawberries from Farndon Farm shop. These are grown on platforms about 4 feet above the floor. Just let the slugs try and get them-no way.
Mrs Earles Chicken


Ingredients



25g butter

1 tbsp oil

5 boneless skinless chicken breasts, chopped

5 bacon rashers rinds removed, chopped

2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 celery sticks chopped

1 leek, sliced and rinsed

25g plain flour

150ml milk

150ml chicken stock

25g button mushrooms, wiped and quartered

Bunch of flat leaved parley, finely chopped

Salt and pepper

For the topping

55g fresh breadcrumbs

55g grated cheese



Method



Preheat oven to gas mark 5 190 degrees

Heat butter and oil in a large pan and brown chicken pieces (takes about five minutes)

Add bacon and garlic to pan until bacon becomes crisp, and then add celery and leek until they soften.

Then lower heat, add flour and cook for a few minutes. Then add milk gradually, and then chicken stock, to make a smooth sauce. Add mushrooms and parsley.

Tip the lot into a large oven proof dish and smooth the surface.

Then mix crumbs and cheese together and spread over the top of the chicken and veg mixture.

Bake for 20 minutes or until the topping is crisp

Serves five people

Redcurrants, final chapter, hot and cold tips

Ok, 25 lbs of wobbly clear jelly, with half a pot for eating this afternoon. Tips.i Cover kitchen with old newspapers.ii Do not read them or you will never get the jelly potted. iiiGet rid of small children.-not for ever, just for the jelly duration Hot jelly and little ones are a bad combo.iv. Only one person per kitchen to pour hot jelly into jars.v No running.vi No domestics until all jelly is potted.vii writung labels is a special job for a  special childviii Get toast or scone(or toast and scones) ready soon.

Redcuurant Jelly, Female Finace Ministers and The White Tiger

Picked 16lbs of redcurrants for jelly-backbreaking, and my most successful gardening trouseres are now covered in squashed currants. I have others in a less advanced state of decay that I can recycle It is most satisfying to turn this sticky mass, slugs taken out of course, into wobbly dark red deliciousness.
In th Guardian today, a photograph I never though to see, the Finace Ministers of three countries -Denmark, Finland and Austria-all women. Margrthe Vestager, Jutta Urpilainen and Maria Felcter.
And my daily reading has been The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga-a tale of coruption and amorality in modern day   India. With just a little rewrite it could equally be about the UK  A rattling good read though.

Leathers(fruity) and Julian Barnes

Fruity Leathers-I had forgotten about these until I saw Aylestone allotmenteers giving away samples at the Leicester Botanic Gardens open day. I think leathers originate in America, when a surplus of fruit and a shortage of sugar led to  fruit leathers, cheeses and butters. I have had great success with damson cheese, less so with apple butter. M has leathers in the oven now.   Leathers reamin liqiud and the kitchen smells of burn.  I  fear and smell failure.
Julian Barnes was born in Coalville. His essay-" My life as a bibliophile"- in last Saturdays Guardian-was a real treat ." When you read a  great book,you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape-into different countries, mores, speech patterns-but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of lifes subtelties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths.. Reading and life are not separate, but symbiotic."   And he wrote Arthur and George .So thank you Coalville

Gardening in the Rain( again)

Good things about gardening in the rain? The weeds come out very easily. Tha bad news? There are loads of them and they get bigger-not by the day but by the minute. I grew verbascum from seed-a mixed packet. They are huge, but far from mixed. All the same soft yellow, and huge floppy silver leaves, nicknamed beggars blankets . So  will have hollyhocks in flower soon backed up with verbascum.
Eating the last of the first sown lettuce, first of the  baby broad beans, Charlottes, redcurrants and 13 raspberries. Picked 6lbs of gooseberries. Time for the gooseberry fool( from the French verb fouler-to crush-it does not mean someone foolish and feckless enough to put 1 pint of cream into a pudding)

Restarting my blog

Many thanks to grandson Nate for getting this blog going again-I hope to post every two days or so. Watch me on Wednesday

I've come home to my blog, by popular demand

I may be talking-or writing-this blog up. Family members, who claim that they love me, say"Why don't you spend a bit less time on Facebook and do something a bit more......." So I am taking this as gentle encouragement to blog.
In any case, I eed a break from the tyranny of the greenhouse. Toughening up the plants-a sort of horticultural weaning, which means taking them all out of the greenhouse in the day and putting them back at night- is alright if the weather was anything like normal, and I did not have 88 dahlias in my care. Plus cosmos, pink margeurites, lobelia, 4 lupins, 3 poppies, which will surely die as they hate being transpanted, and some spindly toms. Must buy better quaility seed compost next yea. And grow fewer dahliasr