Cook sister!

Food Blogger Connect 2009

Remember high school exams?  The hard work, the anxiety about failure, the vaguely hysterical laughter every time you called a friend to ask how their studying was going, and the euphoria of opening the paper and realising that you had condentrated on the right bits?  And of course the anticlimax when you woke up the following day?

That's a bit how I felt on Sunday.  After weeks of e-mailing back and forth, planning my presentation, promotion and a final frantic attempt to secure a table for a dozen people in central London on a Saturday night at little more than 24 hours notice, it's all over.  The first Food Blogger Connect conference took place yesterday in London and from the feedback I've seen and heard so far, it was a roaring success.  Phew!!

Food Blogger Connect is the brainchild of fabulous fellow-food bloggers Bethany of Dirty Kitchen Secrets; Hilda of Saffron & Blueberry; Mowie of Mowielicious; and Jamie of Life's a Feast, who decided it was high time that UK food bloggers had a chance to get together and discuss this crazy thing we do alone at home in our kitchens and in front of our computers.   

From far and wide the food bloggers came... gorgeous Deeba from India, my secret sister Meeta from Germany (as well as Alessio), my co-speaker Jamie from France (as well as Pamela and Claire), Zo from the Netherlands, Kerrin from Switzerland, Aoife from Ireland and a host of super-talented bloggers from the UK (Nic, Sunita, Michelle, Solange, Davina, Kavey, Christina, and Sarah to mention but a few).  The venue for this historic event was Levant, a Lebanese restaurant a stone's throw from Oxford Street, which provided a cosy alternative to the miserable, wet weather outside!

Jamie and I arrived early in order to run through our talk on writing style and voice and soon we were joined by the charming Kang of LondonEater.  Dynamo organiser Bethany was dashing about with cameraman hubby Chris, putting the finishing touches to our goodie bags - it was like being backstage in the hour before the curtain rises!  By lunchtime the other bloggers started to trickle in and we all mingled in the bar area, exchanging cards, putting faces to blog names and renewing old acquaintances.  I'm afraid I didn't take a load of photos - I was just enjoying chatting to people too much! But here are a couple of shots of Bethany and Deeba (and the lovely lady next to Deeba who I spoke to but can't recall her name now - aaarrrgh!  Somebody enlighten me, please??).

Then it was time for lunch, but not before the buffet had been subject to more photos than the Britney Spears falling out of a limo :)  The food was delicious - pillowy, warm flatbreads, crispy falafels, succulent meatballs, tomatoes topped with a grilled haloumi-type cheese, creamy aubergine dip, and a delicious red pepper dip.  And for dessert, I had some wonderful Turkish delight and a delicious syrupy square of flaky pastry - there were also some gorgeous cupcakes, but I called it a day and settled for the outstanding mint tea. Below you can see Kerrin and Deeba, and my only shot of the buffet table.

And then came the main event - the presentations.  After Beth had welcomed us all, I said a few words about the BloggerAid cookbook (please, please help us to promote it and raise money for the UN World Food Programme's School Meals Programme!) before the scheduled presentations began.  Here is a brief summary of each presentation and the grain of wisdom that I took away from each:

• Meeta spoke about photography and "guerilla shooting", as well as lighting and use of props. Wisdom gained: Lowel Ego lights are the way forward if you have to shoot after dark!
• Kang spoke about photography in the dark. Wisdom gained: The slowest shutter speed you can use without visible camera shake is roughly numerically equal to the focal length of the lens you are using - so with a 50mm lens, the slowest shutter speed you should use is 1/50sec.
• Jamie and I spoke about writing style and finding your voice. Wisdom gained, by me, at any rate: no two people go about the craft of writing in exactly the same way.
• I spoke about copyright - and hope that somebody managed to extract some wisdom from my rapid gallop through copyright law!! Apologies that we ran out of time for Q&A - if you were left with any questions about copyright, please feel free to leave a coment or e-mail me and I will do my best to answer you!
• Kang spoke about social media and how to use it to enhance your blogging experience. Wisdom gained: we're all just small fish in a big fish tank :)

And then it was all over - we had reached and breached our allotted time at Levant and we barely had time to collect our goodie bags before being gently ushered out by the staff.  For me, the entire afternoon had passed in a blur.  I was on such a buzz from my & Jamie's successful presentation and the great company, I even forgot to claim my free glass of wine!  I had talked (and talked and talked!), cemented old friendships, networked, and delighted in new friendships - to ask for more from a rainy Saturday afternoon would be greedy.  Roll on Food Bloggers Connect 2010!

That evening, I enjoyed a delightful meal in the company of my fellow-speakers, organisers and various wonderful bloggers, but more of that in a following post.  And by the next morning, like for Cinderella, it felt a bit like it had all been a happy dream.  The only sign that this wonderful event had actually happened was the bag of gifts that I'd brought home (thanks Deeba, Meeta, Sunita and Jamie!!), and the goodie bag containing Unearthed olives with manchego and chillies; Unearthed choc chip mini-pannetone; Linwoods hemp seeds; Keen's organic extra mature cheddar; and boxes of Maldon sea salt, smoked salt and salt with pepper.  So all that remained was for Cinderella to have her (absolutely delicious!) pannetone for breakfast, and dream of FBC10.

Here are some other bloggers' prespectives on the day from Kang (London Eater),  Sarah (Food for Think), Paul (Get me Cooking), Aiofe (The Daily Spud),  Davina (The Sugar Bar),  Sarah (Meals with Sarah), Sarah (Maison Cupcake),George (Culinary Travels of a Kitchen Goddess), Oz (The Kitchen Butterfly); Bethany (Dirty Kitchen Secrets); Jamie (Life's a Feast); Mowie (Mowielicious); Nora (Nora the Kitchen 'Splorer); Hilda (Saffron & Blueberry); Nic (Cherrapeno); Sarka (Cooking Your Dream); Deeba (Passionate About Baking); Meeta (What's for Lunch, Honey? ); Sunita (Sunita's World); Pam (The Cooking Ninja); Solange (Pebble Soup); and Alessio (Recipe Taster).

**STOP PRESS**

Tentative dates for FBC10 are 5 & 6 June 2010!  Head on over to Bethany's blog and leave a comment to register your interest!

Saturday Snapshots #66

Tribune Tower, Chicago - October 2008

One of the most iconic buildings in Chicago is the famous Tribune Tower.  Completed in 1925, it houses the Chicago Tribune newspaper as well as WGN Radio which broadcasts from a studio with windows onto the street so that you can watch broadcasts. 

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune hosted an international competition to find a design for its new headquarters, and offered a $50,000 prize for "the most beautiful and eye-catching building in the world".  More than 260 entries were received, and the winning design was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.  The distinctive  buttresses at the top levels are what gives the building its unique shape, but it was the lower levels that I found more fascinating. 

Prior to the building of the Tribune Tower, correspondents for the newspaper brought back rocks and bricks from a variety of historically important sites throughout the world. Many of these have been incorporated into the lowest levels of the building and are labeled with their location of origin. Stones included in the wall are from such sites as the Trondheim Cathedral, Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, the Palace of Westminster, the Great Pyramid, The Alamo, Notre Dame, Abraham Lincoln's Tomb, the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall, to name but a few.

This picture was taken as I walked along the Chicago River and caught sight of the building reflected in a puddle left by the previous night's rain.

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  

All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store, including the new Year of Saturday Snapshots calendar, an A3-size calendar bringing together the most popular images from the first year of Saturday Snapshots.  Feel free to browse - it makes a great Christmas stocking filler!

Spinach, feta, sun-dried tomato and toasted seed salad

I am mostly a positive person, and I mostly love living here in London.  But every now and then you just have one of those afternoons. 

Next week is the week-long training programme at work for which I am solely responsible, so the afternoon was filled with printing materials, collating folders and making sure that things will generally run smoothly.  It was also filled with jammed printers, staplers that refused to attach more than about 3 sheets of paper to each other... and the news that the norovirus has broken out in our firm - specifically on our floor.  Nothing like a nasty bug doing the rounds to make colleagues feel like dousing each other in antibacterial wash!!

I had quite a bit of stuff to carry home on the train so I decided to stay late and miss the rush hour, so it was about 19h15 before I stepped out of the office and into the freezing night.  The journey went OK until I had to change trains at a station about 4 stops from home.  For a start, there had been some sort of problem on the line and trains were simply not running east.  It also happens that this is a major station serving the ExCEL exhibition centre in east London, and there is a major event on there tonght - a charismatic church is having it annual all-night mass prayer rally.  So the platform just got fuller... and fuller... and fuller in the 20 mintes I stood there with NO trains passing through.  When the first train finally came through, the scrum was so bad I just turned around and pushed my way back out, and watched as a mother tried to squeeze herself and her child onto a carriage that clearly did not have space for them... only to have the doors shut on the kid.  Cue rather a lot of crying.  But at least it meant that the mother was persuaded to take herself off the train to comfort her child, so that the doors could shut and the train could leave the platform. 

And so I resumed my frozen wait on the platform.  At some point, my bag strap slipped off my shoulder and I hitched it back up using a hand already clutching a bulging bag of groceries. In the process, the grocery bag grazed (and I mean grazed) the backpack of the guy standing directly in front of me... who turned around with a look of deep suspicion and vague distaste.  "Sorry", I smiled, "it was just my bag," indicating said grocery bag.  He proceeded to look me up and down as if I had urinated on his bag (and his shoes) while he wasn't looking, proceeded to carefully examine the zips of his bag, look me humourlessly up and down again, and then turn his back on me.  I felt like yelling "WITH WHICH SECRET THIRD HAND NOT CURRENTLY CLUTCHING A BAG DO YOU THINK I COULD POSSIBLY HAVE OPENED YOUR VERY UNDESIRABLE BAG, YOU FREAK?"  I had to walk down the platform a little way so as not to push him in front of the next oncoming train.

Give.  Me.  Strength.

Maybe I should have kept a small Tupperware of this delectable salad in my bag for emergencies such as this.  After all, Popeye always swore by spinach, the green leafy superfood packed with iron, Vitamin K and Vitamin A, to give him strength.  Everything about this salad is oh so right.  It's ridiculously quick to make, it's full of stuff that is good for you (spinach, nuts & seeds, tomatoes) and boy oh boy, is it ever delicious!  My advice to you is not to wait until you need strength as badly as I did tonight.  Just go out and buy the ingredients for this salad right now, and eat it at the next available mealtime.  Your strength will be instantly restored :)

SPINACH, FETA, SUN-DRIED TOMATO & TOASTED SEED SALAD (serves 8-10)

Ingredients:

about 8 cups of baby spinach leaves, washed and dried
200g feta cheese, crumbled
250g sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, drained
about 1/2 a cup of mixed pine-nuts and pumpkin seeds

Method:

Heat the pine-nuts and pumkin seeds gently in a non-stick pan, stirring occasionally.   Watch them like a hawk as they burn easily and then they are ruined.  When they begin to brown in places and smell toasty, remove from the pan and allow to cool on some kitchen towel.

Place the spinach in a wide, shallow glass bowl and add the tomatoes (you may want to chop some of the tomatoes in half if they are big).  Crumble the feta over the salad and toss well.

Sprinkle the cooled seeds on top and serve with good olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the side. 

This salad works as well with a barbecue as with a risotto - or even grilled fish.

Cooksister calendars now available!

You all know the feeling.  The knot in your stomach.  The tightness in your chest.  The shallow breaths and elevated heart-rate. The shooting pains down your left arm.

Yes, folks, the festive season is upon us.  The knot in your stomach is from too much cranberry sauce.  The tightness in your chest returns every time you think about Aunty Ethel and Cousin Bill resuming their 2-decade feud across your dining table at Christmas lunch.  The shallow breaths and elevated heart rate are from spending 7 hours in a steam-filled kitchen heated to tropical temperatures to try and get lunch cooked.  And the shooting pains are signs of repetitive strain injury from repeated opening of your wallet.

I am feeling particularly virtuous as all my Christmas shopping is done, bar the food for the Christmas lunch we are hosting at home.  And of course, a present for Nick (aka The Hardest Man in The World To Buy Gifts For). so, umm, maybe not entirely virtuous. But generally, I am feeling in control of Christmas, and that's not something you hear me say every year.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that I am spending 2 weeks in South Africa between now and Christmas and have had to get organised early... but for those of you who are still panicking about what to buy, I am thrilled to unveil the 2010 CookSister calendars - the perfect gift for family, friends... or yourself! Have a look - each picture below links to the calendar and you can page through it and see all 12 images on screen 

Let's see:  there's one featuring only London: 

There's one featuring the most popular photographs from my Saturday Snapshots series:

There's one featuring my favourite shots of Italy:

And there's one featuring only beautiful beaches:

All the calendars are printed on 200gsm high quality satin art paper and come with hanger and white wire binding.  And if you buy three or more (the same or different calendars), they will throw in shipping for free! At the end of the year, you can frame the prints - it a lot cheaper than buying the prints individually.  Bargain :) To receive your CookSister calendars by Christmas, order by 13 December in the US and UK; by 11 December in Continental Europe and Canada; by 17 December for Australia; and by 9 December for the rest of the world.

And if those don't grab your fancy, there's always the BloggerAid Cook Book - 130 tried and tested recipes from food bloggers around the world, now available to purchase online with 100% of the royalties going to the UN World Food Programme's School Meals Programme.  Your $30 could make a big difference to a small child.

And while we're in the festive spirit, how about a quick meme?  I hadn't had a good meme in ages, till my dear friend Courtney sent me this one a week or so back.  The idea is to provide one-word answers to the questions below:

1. Where is your cell phone? Desk
2. Your hair? Ponytailed
3. Your mother? Inspiration
4. Your father? Complicated
5. Your favorite food? Italian
6. Your dream last night? Confidential!
7. Your favorite drink? Champagne
8. Your dream/goal? Happiness
9. What room are you in? Study
10. Your hobby? Blogging
11. Your fear? Illness
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? USA
13. Where were you last night? Restaurant
14. Something you aren’t? Homophobic!
15. Muffins? Savoury
16. Wish list item? Lottery
17. Where did you grow up? PortElizabeth
18. Last thing you did? Washing
19. What are you wearing? Fleece
20. Your TV? Downstairs
21. Your pets? None
22. Friends? Scattered
23. Your life? Unexpected
24. Your mood? Anticipation
25. Missing someone? Mamma
26. Vehicle? Volvo
27. Something you’re not wearing? Jewellery
28. Your favorite store? Amazon
29.Your favorite color? Cerise
30. When was the last time you laughed? Today
31. Last time you cried? Tonight
32. Your best friend? Andréa
33. One place you go to over and over again? Work!
34. One person who e-mails you regularly? LisaB
35. Favorite place to eat? Outside

I'm meant to pass the baton on to six other bloggers - so I nominate a half dozen fab fellow-South Africans:  Charlotte, Kit, Browniegirl, Mel, Ronell and Bordeaux.  Have fun!

Salmon tagliatelle and a Cirio product review

 

Sometimes, only comfort food will do.

Maybe it's the windy, rainy weather.  Maybe it was the rather stressful Friday and Saturday I spent co-ordinating a training seminar for nearly 100 people in Croydon last weekend.  Or the nasty tummy bug I had 3 days earlier...  

Whatever the reason, last Monday when I got home from work, the only thing I wanted was something warm and comforting that wasn't going to take all night to make.  And preferably using stuff I already had in my store cupbord and fridge!

So what did I find when I opened my store cupboard?  Well, for a start, there was a tin of red salmon, and then the tetrapaks of tomato caught my eye.  Tetrapaks of tomato, I hear you ask?  Surely you mean tomato juice?  No, I mean the tetrapaks of chopped tomato, kindly sent to me a while back by Cirio, an Italian company that has been in the tinned tomato business since the 1800s.  They recently launched a range of chopped tomatoes in 390g tetrapaks rather than tins, which are esier to store and fully recyclable.  The current flavours apart from plain are onion & garlic; chilli; and basil - and it is the latter that I used in this recipe. 

The Cirio tetrapaks are indeed very easy to open - never mind no can opener, you don't even need scissors, thanks to the easy-tear perforated strip.  The contents also pleased me because unlike some chopped tomato brands, the Cirio tetrapaks definitely contain more solid tomato chunks than liquid.  And then there is the taste. One of the things my mom taught me from a young age was that when you use tinned tomatoes, always add a teaspoon of sugar to counter the acidity.  Well, that was because my mom was not familiar with Cirio products.  The tomatoes were so naturally sweet that I left the sugar out of the recipe, and the Cirio website confirms that the concentration of natural sugars in their tetrapaks is indeed higher than in fresh tomatoes - and my tastebuds agree!  (Apparently there's even more concentrated natural sugar in the Cirio 70g pots of double-concentrated tomato paste, but I've yet to try my sample pots.)  The Cirio products are available in Sainsbury, Waitrose and Morrison's as well as indepentent grocers and delicatessens - and they are definitely worth trying.

This recipe is pasted into my recipe index book and was part of a John West tinned salmon promotion tht I clipped in South Africa many years ago, back when I lived in a country where fresh salmon was near-unaffordably expensive :)  It's made with the kind of ingredients that I always have on hand, and it's both seriously delicious and perfectly comforting.  In the interests of full disclosure, I have say that I used linguine instead of tagliatelle this time, and that I must give due credit for the deliciousness of the dish to the excellent Setaro pasta that I used.  We picked up a couple of packs of their linguine on a previous Italian trip and I am now sorry we did not bring back an entire suitcase - it's that good.  If anbody knows where I can get it in the UK, please spill the beans (alternatively my US friends now know what to send me for Christmas as it appears to be freely available there!)

SALMON TAGLIATELLE (serves 4)

Ingredients

1 large onion, finely chopped
30ml olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 x 410g tin chopped tomatoes (I used the Cirio 390g tetrapak)
5 ml sugar (not necessary if using Cirio!)
salt and freshly ground black pepper
10 ml fresh or dried dill
1 x 410g tin red salmon, drained
200ml white wine
60ml chopped parsley
150ml single cream

Method

Sauté the onion in the oil until soft, then add the garlic and sauté for a further minute, taking care not to burn it.  Add the chopped tomatoes, sugar, salt, pepper and dill and simmer for about 5 minutes.  Add the drained salmon and wine and simmer for another five mintes.  Add the parsley and cream.  In the meantime, cook the tagliatelle in plenty of salted water until it is al dente.  Serve topped with the salmon sauce and some grated Parmiggiano cheese (optional).

I am submitting this as my entry into this week's Presto Pasta Nights, the event started by the lovely Ruth of Once Upon a Feast and hosted this week by Deb of Kahakai Kitchen.  Incidentally, I got to know both of these lovely, talented ladies a whole lot better when they volunteered to help with the BloggerAid Cook Book recently.  I'm excited to say that this book, featuring 130 tried and tested recipes from food bloggers around the world is now available to purchase online with 100% of the royalties going to the UN World Food Programme's School Meals Programme.  Your $30 could make a big difference to a small child.

Saturday Snapshots #65

 

Seeing red - Reims, August 2007

What better way to  brighten up a cold, rainy, grey London Sunday morning than a flaky croissant, a cup of steaming coffee and a picture of these spectacularly red Boston Ivy (related to but distinct from the Viriginia Creeper) leaves taken on our visit to the Piper Heidsieck cellars in Reims, the Champagne capital of the world.

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store, including the new Year of Saturday Snapshots calendar, an A3-size calendar bringing together the most popular images from the first year of Saturday Snapshots.  Feel free to browse - it makes a great Christmas stocking filler!

The BloggerAid Cook Book has arrived!

Not having children, I don't feel I can speak authoritatively about the pain of childbirth and how you apparently forget about how bad it was (otherwise there would be a LOT more single-child families around...!).  But I DO feel qualified to speak with authority about the labour pains of producing a collaborative recipe book containing close to 130 recipes from food bloggers around the world, because I  have just been involved in such a birth process. And I am thrilled to announce the safe arrival of the BloggerAid - Changing the Face of Famine Cook Book with all ten fingers and toes and all recipes perfectly formed!

If the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, the journey of this cookbook started with a germ of an ambitious idea, a lot of determination, and absolutely no concept of the amount of hard work to follow (which explains our optimism and lack of fear!).  We truly had no idea of the breadth of our ignorance about the process of creating a marketable, professionally finished cookbook. The birthing process involved a team of a dozen volunteer editors, proofreaders and designers; three editors-in-chief on a very steep learning curve; hours of poring over punctuation, spelling and conversions; huge spreadsheets to save our sanity; late nights; frantic e-mail exchanges; and a disturbing amount of talk between abovementioned editors-in-chief about tequila and cabana boys ;-). It ended with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction in a job well done, a book that we can all be proud of, and a collection of friendships forged for life.

BloggerAid – Changing the Face of Famine (BA-CFF) was started in 2009 by Val and Giz and born from the idea that there is power in a network, and that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results if they pull together. They decided on a charity cookbook as their first major fundraising project and chose the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) to receive the funds generated by the cookbook because of the wonderful work this organization does. More specifically, one hundred percent of the proceeds from the cookbook will go to the WFP’s School Meals Programme, which benefits an average of 22 million hungry children each year.  Sitting in our clean, comfortable homes cooking, eating and writing about food it is easy to ignore these realities. But as a wise man once said, those who do harm are not nearly as dangerous to this world as those who look on without doing anything.

So what can you expect to find inside? Breakfast enchiladas. Pomegranate tabbouleh salad. Tomato & cheese ravioli with aubergine sauce.  Serrano ham paella with oyster mushrooms.  Shrimp biryani curry. Lentil bugers.  My very own sage and sun-dried tomato chicken breasts. Triple-layer orange-passion fruit tart.  Cardamom ice-cream.  And gorgeous full-colour photographs of many of the recipes.

Drooling yet?  So what are you waiting for - buy the book! At only $30 for 130 international, tried-and-tested recipes, it is a bargain.

The BloggerAid Cook Book is only available to purchase on-line, through the Create Space (our printer) e-store. You will not find the book on the Amazon site – royalties paid to the WFP School Meals Program are much higher if we sell through the e-store as opposed to Amazon, and every cent of the royalties goes directly to the WFP School Meals Programme.

How else can you help? 

If you buy the book, please review it enthhusiastically on your blog!  It would also be great if you would be prepared to help spread the word by blogging about the book and add a little badge in a prominent position on your blog's sidebar, promoting the book and linking to the e-store.  Please feel free to ask me if you are unsure of how to do this and I'll try my best to help.  And if you have a local newspaper or any other publication that you think might be willing to run a story on the book, I can send you a press release and background info - please feel free to ask.  the more publicity we can get, the more money the World Food Programme makes, and the more children get fed.

Also, please remember to have a look at my latest column on Food24, all about the latest London trend of uderground restaurants and whether they would work in South Africa!

Mirabelle and ginger jam

Do you still remember your first time?

All that panic-stricken wondering whether you were doing it right...

Whether it was firm enough yet...

Whether it had gone on long enough or not...

Whether it was really supposed to look like that...

Whether the equipment was in deep enough...

I remember my first time very well - but then I would, because it only happened over the summer.

I am, of course, talking about my first attempt at making jam.

Well, what did you think I was talking about?!

As I've mentioned before, we were thrilled to discover back in the summer that our neighbours have a huge cherry plum (or mirabelle) tree in their garden, and that a substantial number of the plums fall directly into our garden.  I have already blogged the mirabelle and coconut muffins that I have made, and I have yet to tell you about the stuffed pork fillet and the clafoutis, but those are for another day. 

Jam making is one of those things that has been looming over me and making me feel like a culinary fraud - how can I be a "proper" foodie if I haven't made my own jam?  So when our fridge was beginning to reach bursting point with all the cherry plums during the summer and I needed to use up lots of them in a hurry, I decided to grasp the nettle and try making some jam.

The mechanics of jam making are pretty simple:  you boil up some fruit, a little water, some pectin and a lot of sugar and keep it boiling at a constant high temperature for 15 minutes or so until it starts to thicken.  Then you can strain and bottle it, or bottle it without straining.  One of the things that had always worried me about jam-making was where I'd find pectin, but I was heartened to learn that mirabelles are naturally high in pectin and therefore perfectly suited to jam.  Another problem that had always put me off was sterilizing the jars - I was quite sure that it would be fiddly and complicated, or that I'd do it wrong and give everyone a dose of e-coli bacteria!! If this is how you feel too, let me give you some reassuarance - say after me:  sterilizing glass jars is really, really easy!

Here's how to sterilize your glass jars:

Wash the jars and lids in hot, soapy water.  Place the damp jars upside down in a cold oven and turn it to 160C (NB - start the jars in a cold oven - if you put the jars into a hot oven they may crack and break).  Once the oven has heated up to 160C the jars are ready to be used - turn off the oven but leave the jars where they are.  In the meantime, place the lids in a small saucepan of water and bring to the boil.  Boil for 5 minutes, after which the lids are ready to use.

As for the recipe, I turned to that most excellent resource for all things English countryside-related, The Cottage Smallholder - they had two wild plum jam recipes, one of which I adapted for my jam. I figured that the plums and the sugar would make the jam fairly sweet, so I needed something spicier to counterbalance the sweetness - and what better candidate can there be for a spicy fruit jam than ginger?

The process was a lot simpler than I imagined - everything worked lke it was supposed to and I got the mixture to 220C without any effort at all.  I would suggest investing in a sugar/candy thermometer if you are going to venture into jam-making as it takes the guesswork out of the boiling stage, particularly if (like me) you have no idea what the mixture is supposed to look like!  As you see from my two pictures, once the mixture has reached a rolling boil at the correct temperature, it will foam up right to the rim of the pot.  Keep a close eye on it because allowing it to boil over will be incredibly messy.

The end result was (give or take a minute or two of, ahem, overcooking...!) astonishingly good.  The consistency and colour were wonderful, and the flavour was fantastic - sweet, yet tart, and with a subtle hint of ginger, rather than an overwhelming wave of the stuff.  I managed to leave the kitchen at the crucial moment to open the front door and came back to find a distinctly caramelly smell in the kitchen...  The jam didn't quite catch, but it was close enough to impart a slight caramel flavour - entirely my fault and not advisable, but not the end of the world either as I still love the finished product.  Still, take it as a cautionary tale!

I am submitting this recipe to my friend Meeta of What's for Lunch, Honey? for her Monthly Mingle event.  The theme this month is brunch - and what brunch would be complete without some crispy toast, good butter and home-made jam?  I will also be meeting Meeta in person for the first time later this month when we are both speaking at Food Blogger Connect, the first UK food blogger conference.  Hope to see loads of you there!

CHERRY PLUM (MIRABELLE) AND GINGER JAM

Ingredients

1kg ripe cherry plums (you can substitute ordinary plums too but may need to add pectin)
1 kg granulated sugar
300ml water
2 tsp grated fresh ginger

Method:

Wash the plums in a colander and discard any that are damaged.  Don't worry about bruises - if you use windfall plums, most of them will have some bruising!

Place the washed plums and the water into a large, deep saucepan and simmer gently until the plum skins start to split.  Use a slotted spoon to remove the stones.

Add the sugar and ginger and stir gently over low heat until you are certain that all the sugar crystals have dissilved.  If you are a novice like me, clip a candy thermometer to the side of your pan, with the probe sticking into the fruit mix.

Turn up the heat to high and bring the mixture to a rolling boil - if you are wondering what a roling boil looks lke, see the picture on the right.  You will see only fine, frothy bubbles, no liquid, and the bubbles will rise terrifyingly close to the rim of the pot :)  The temperature you should be aiming for on your candy thermometer is a steady 215F.

Allow to boil like this for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.  After 10 minutes, you can start testing whether the jam has reached setting point.  One of the methods I've seen used all over the net is the "cold plate" method.  When you start making the jam, put a small plate in the fridge to chill.  When you start testing, drizzle a small amount of the mix onto the cold plate and return to the fridge for a couple of minutes.  If you then tilt the plate and the mix runs like liquid, the jam is not ready - continue boiling for another 5 minutes and test again.  The jam is ready when, upon tilting the plate, the jam oozes rather than runs and a finger drawn lightly across the surface of the test sample leaves a crinkly track (in other words, the surface has set).  Remove from the heat.

Carefully remove the hot jars from the oven and fill each with jam - do not let them cool, otherwise the heat from the jam will crack them.  Be very careful when pouring as the jam will be very hot and can burn you! Screw the lids tightly onto the filled jars - you will need a cloth or oven glove to hold the hot jars.  As the jam starts to cool, the lid should be sucked down into the sealed position (if your lids have the little pop-up seal indicator).  Remember to label the jars with the contents and date when cool and store in a cool, dark place.  If you have sterilised your jars properly, the jam can last for months - even years.

Saturday snapshots #64

 Dome of St Peter's Basilica - Vatican City, 2007

St Peter's Basilica was built between 1506 and 1626 and is regarded as the symbolic "Mother Church" of the Catholic faith.  The site of the basilica is said to be directly above the burial place of Saint Peter and there has been a church here since the 4th century AD.  Built in the Italian Renaissance style, the basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world, holding 60,000 people, and the interior is a treasure trove of sumptuous religious art and sculpture. The dome of St. Peter's rises to a total height of 136.57 metres (448.1 ft) from the floor of the basilica to the top of the external cross. It is the tallest dome in the world, and this photo was taken from where I stood, transfixed, directly below that dome.

If you love this photo, why not take a look at my Bella Italia 2010 calendar in which it features, available to purchase now in my Redbubble store.

This is part of a series of non-food photographs that will be published every Saturday on CookSister. Click here for a full list of photographs previously featured.  All photos featured in Saturday Snapshots are available to buy as greeting cards or prints in my RedBubble store, including the new Year of Saturday Snapshots calendar, an A3-size calendar bringing together the most popular images from the first year of Saturday Snapshots.

Spiced pear, blackberry & pistachio crumble

Don't you hate it when something looks beautiful on the outside but the inside does not live up to expectations?

That gorgeous boy you always adored from afar on the beach... who turned out to be as thick as two short planks with stinky feet and bad breath.

The cookbook with the glossy cover... filled with ill-conceived flavour combinations and impractical recipes.

The funkiest CD cover ever... filled with the most turgid music in the world

A beautiful bag of fruit... that ends up being flavourless and mely.

Just recently, we've had a couple of fruit-related incidents like this.  Things like melons are always difficult in this country.  They are underripe and chilled to within an inch of their lives, and so they smell of nothing when you buy them.  This makes every purchase of a melon in this country a pot luck.  But you'd think other fruit might be more reliable.  Hah.  Last week Nick bought two bags of Spanish clementines for the price of one and, like it said on the label, they were indeed super-sweet.  But within a week, three of them had also started to decompose messily in my fruitbowl!  Earlier in the summer, being unable to find my favourite William pears, we bought another rosier variety (they were most like comice pears), and very beautiful they were with their red blush. I cut one open for breakfast, expecting a sweet juicy reward... but instead I got a dry, mealy disaster of a pear.  Was the wholebag like this??  I wasn't really interested in finding out and being disappointed over and over again - but at the same time, I wasn't going to throw the whole lot out! 

As regular readers may recall, I spent rather a lot of Fridays this summer picking blackberries near our house and at the same time as the pears were disgracing themselves in my fruit bowl, I also had a couple of cups of fresh blackberries loitering in the kitchen.  For our big summer braai/bbq, I needed a dessert that wasnt particularly time-critical and could be forgotten left in the oven a little longer than planned without major ill-effects.  What better than a fruit crumble?  I figured I'd take a chance and use the mealy pear's friends (and almost all of them were similarly mealy...) together with the blackberries, but I also wanted to recreate something of the fantatic flavours of the pear and cardamom tarte tatin that I'd made previously.  And the idea of pistachios in the mix just would not go away...

This crumble (which is, strictly speaking, a crisp I suppose!) ticks all the abovementioned boxes, fed 8-10 people (with the addition of some vanilla custard) and was deeply, spicyly delicious.  and the best part was that nobody, but nobody would have guessed how unpromising the pears originally were :)

SPICED PEAR, BLACKBERRY AND PISTACHIO CRUMBLE (serves 8-10) 

Ingredients:

 

6 small pears, peeled, cored and sliced
1.5 cups cup fresh or frozen blackberries 
250ml ml sugar
2 tbsp cornstarch

1/2 tsp cinnamon

seeds from 3 cardamom pods, crushed

 

1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
1/2 cup flour
2/3 cup cold butter, cut into chunks
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
Pinch of salt
1/2 cup pistachios, chopped
Butter (for greasing)

Method:

In a large bowl combine the pears, blackberries, sugar, cornstarch and spices  and toss to blend.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.  Mix the oats, flour, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt together in a large bowl. Work mixture together with fingers until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add pistachios and blend well.

Butter an 20x20cm baking dish. Pour the fruit filling into dish and mound the topping over filling, covering it completely. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until bubbly and golden.  Serve with lots of custard.