upside down pear pudding

Peel core and quarter 3 or 4 pears - enough to cover the bottom of a 20cm/8 inch cake pan. I use a silicon one, but if not, grease it well, and I’d line it with baking parchment.

In a food processor, combine 175g of butter and 175g of caster sugar until fluffy and soft. Add 2 eggs, and blitz again, then add another egg, 175g of self raising flour, and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Pulse till combined.

Spread the mixture over the pears, and bake at gas mark 4 / 180° for 45-50 minutes. Leave to cool for about 5 minutes, then turn out on to a plate.

Sunday supper

As previously noted, we picked up the first local asparagus of the year on Saturday; with it, we cooked one of our favourites - asparagus stir-fried with ginger and red chilli. It sounds a terrible thing to do to fresh asparagus, I know, but trust me … it really is glorious.

We followed this with a rhubarb and ginger sponge pudding - bit piggy, really, but it is Sunday. I discovered the wondrous combination of rhubarb and fresh ginger a couple of years ago; I was following a recipe that called for stem ginger in syrup, and I thought it would be too sweet, so lobbed some finely minced fresh in instead. We’ve never looked back!

If you don’t have any ginger in the house (and you *should*, of course) remember that elderflower works wonderfully well with rhubarb too, so a splash of elderflower cordial would make a very good substitute, although I’d cut the sugar down a little in that case.

Rhubarb is a Very Fine Thing indeed.

sometimes simple is good

There was a rather tired cauliflower in the fridge. So I made a cauli cheese, with breadcrumbs on the top. This is probably what posh people call “au gratin”.

We had it with spuds roasted in goose fat. Food fit for the ghods!

Oh, and more plum crumble. Groan. All gone now, however.

weekend 19/20 april

We didn’t set foot out of the house. Made a batch of bananananana muffins on Friday night, and then we ate far too many of them, and both had a nasty sugar hit overnight. Serves us right.

Saturday, made soda bread for lunch, which we had with the previously mentioned chickie! soup. Supper was pork and pineapple - I went into autopilot while I was making it, and did a load of ginger, which isn’t actually in the recipe. Was still delicious.

Sunday was toasted soda bread for breakfast, and a moussaka for supper, followed - foolishly - by a plum crumble with ice cream. Belch.

I’m going to have to start photographing things, aren’t I ..