Recipes

Drunken Strawberries

Best if you can bear to leave them until the following day.

2 Punnets of Strawberries
1 dessertspoon of Caster Sugar
Quarter of a wine glass of Home Made Cherry Brandy (or just brandy will do!)
Hull (de-stalk) the strawberries, halve or quarter them if necessary, and place in a large bowl.
Sprinkle the strawberries with the brandy.
Sprinkle the sugar over the strawberries and brandy, and mix well.
Cover with cling film and leave in the fridge overnight (if you can bear to!)
Serve with Greek yoghurt, or Vanilla ice cream, or fresh cream. 


Seedless Raspberry Jam


Pick the raspberries through the season as they ripen and freeze them as you go along.

Once you have enough (at the end of the season probably) defrost them all in a big bowl. They will collapse and go squishy and juicy when they defrost.

This is the messy bit. Push the raw raspberries through a sieve into a large measuring jug bit by bit, until you have all the juice and pulp in the jug and a pile of dryish seeds. Discard the seeds.

You make the jam in the same way as a bramble jelly, i.e. a pint of juice to a pound of sugar. Raspberries aren't as high in pectin as brambles, so you may want to add some lemon juice, or some cooking apple peel & lemon peel tied up in a muslin bag to the mix to increase the pectin. Or you could use sugar with added pectin but I've never used this so have no idea whether it would work.

Bung the raspberry juicy pulp and the sugar (and the muslin bag of cooking apple peel/lemon peel if used) in a big pan and cook it until it gets to the setting stage.

Pot into sterilised jars, pop the lids on and allow to cool before labelling.

The resultant jam is a little sharp in flavour and utterly delicious.




Proper Yorkshire Parkin recipe


Proper parkin is a dark, sticky cake-cum-flapjack, it’s good warm with custard as a pudding, perhaps with some poached pears, but it's best left for several days before eating it if you can resist.

125g butter
110g caster sugar
140g black treacle
110g golden syrup
225g medium oatmeal or porridge oats blended in a food processor to a coarse sandy consistency
110g self-raising flour
3 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground mixed spice
Pinch of salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 tbsp milk

Preheat the oven to 140C/Gas 1. Grease and line a 20cmx20cm cake tin.Put the butter, sugar, treacle and syrup and heat gently until the butter is melted. Don’t let it boil.

Mix the oats, flour, ginger, spice and salt together in a bowl and add the contents of the pan, stirring well until the dry ingredients are well coated.

Mix in the eggs and milk. Scrape the mixture into the prepared baking tin. Bake for an hour, checking often that it doesn’t get too dark on top (cover it with paper or foil if it threatens to burn).

Leave to cool in the tin, then wrap it well and store in an airtight container.

Cut into squares to serve. Om nom nom.

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