Glazed Gammon Steaks with Pineapple Salsa

Remember Gammon and Pineapple?

This recipe is by those lovely chaps The Hairy Bikers - they make cooking fun and I love their recipes too.

Can you remember gammon, pineapple, egg and peas from the 70's? I used to eat this at the Leicester branch of Berni Inn which served British classic food, I'm surprised pubs still serve this retro classic.

The Hairy Bikers have given this classic a twist and poshed it up, they have glazed the gammon with honey and grain mustard (I used Dijon mustard), the fresh pineapple salsa takes this dish to another level.

No chips this time round but potato wedges, fried egg and of course peas.

The recipe can be found on the BBC Food Website.

Eating Places APlenty Back in the 1970's in Leicester - I have very fond memories of some of these places especially the Pancake House.

Plum, Rhubarb and Apple Crumble

I am enjoying reading The Hairy Bikers' Big Book of Baking and trying out a few of the recipes.  The television series to accompany the book has finished and I am really going to miss watching it every week.  They made me smile:)

This recipe is taken from the book and is called Slovakian Fruit Crumble, but I have adapted it.  I definitely can't call it Slovakian Fruit Crumble now.

The mix of plums, rhubarb and apple is really, really good, and is a mix of fruits I can recommend you try.  I popped my fruit mix into a bowl and cooked them in the microwave for a few minutes to start cooking them - I am pleased I did this otherwise I think some of the fruit wouldn't have cooked through. 

Serves: 6

4 ripe plums, 1 large apple, 6 stalks rhubarb, 6 tbsp caster sugar, ½ tsp cinnamon, juice of  ½ lemon.

Crumble Topping: 175g Plain Flour, 1 tsp Baking Powder, ½ tsp allspice, 5 tbsp demerara sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 80g diced butter.

1. Grease a large ovenproof dish. Preheat the oven to 200°C/Fan 180°C/Gas 4.
2. Halve and stone the plums. Peel, core and dice the apple. Chop the rhubarb.
3. Put the fruit into the ovenproof dish and mix with the sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice.
4. Make the crumble: Put the flour, allspice, sugar and cinnamon into a large bowl and mix together, add the cubes of butter and rub in until the mixture looks like large breadcrumbs.
5. Scatter the crumble mix over the fruit and cook for 20-30 minutes until the fruit bubbles, the topping is golden and check the fruit is cooked.

Plum, Apple and Blackberry One Crust Pie

I really like these one crust pies, they always look so comforting and inviting. This recipe is by the Hairy Bikers' from their book Perfect Pies - some may say it isn't a pie because it hasn't got a lid but Delia Smith has a similar recipe in The Summer Collection, she also refers to this as a very easy one-crust pie, and so pie it is.

The pastry is brushed with egg and dusted heavily with golden caster sugar to give a sweet crunch when you bite into the buttery pastry. The mix of fruit is a perfect balance, but the recipe only gives 3 tablespoons of caster sugar to sweeten the fruit and I was a little concerned this was going to give a tart fruit mix. I used about 5 tablespoons of sugar and the sweetness was perfect.

The Hairy Bikers' omitted to say the size to roll out the pastry and so it was left for me to guess. Ha ha but I didn't, this is where Delia came in, in her book she says to roll the pastry out to a round of approximately 35cm and if you pile the fruit onto a 25cm circle and then turn the edges of the pastry up everything will be fine. The pastry needed a few more minutes to cook than the time specified in the book, but the buttery pastry was fabulous and the filling was perfect. A perfect pie for Mr W and myself, and so I'll give it 5/5.

The Hairy Bikers' have a huge smile on their faces on the front cover of the book and this book makes me smile too:) I don't normally give books a score but this one definitely deserves 5/5.

Book Recommendation: Tarts with Tops On, the title always makes me laugh, is written by Tamasin Day-Lewis, it is a brilliant book, well worth seeking out and I would recommend this book for more really good pie recipes.

Creamy Haddock Gratins

I made four of these lovely little gratins and they were one of the best dinners we had this week. They were a bit of a faff to make and I seemed to use every basin and saucepan in the kitchen, I managed to run out of work surface and made a mess everywhere too. There wasn't a space in the kitchen to take the photograph of the gratins and so I had to run outside and photograph them, it was so cold outside they cooled down straight away, looked a little sorry for themselves and had to be rescued with a few grilled cherry tomatoes placed on top to cheer them up.

The lack of preparation was because I had planned to cook salmon but somehow the salmon managed to get lost. I know I bought it, I found my receipt - I looked in the fridge, the freezer, in the car....I can only think it must have got fed up and swam back to the river. Or, it's still in Sainsbury's, but I felt too embarrassed to ring up and ask if they had found some salmon hanging around. Mr W said forget about the fish, but how am I supposed to forget about the fish that somehow managed to get lost between the supermarket and home?

It's been a week of losses, Mr W lost the remotes to the DVD and the hifi, he also fell asleep in the cinema and he nearly lost me when he started snoring! I have also lost some Tupperware containers which I use to put small amounts of sauces into for the freezer. It's also been a week of frustrations, we have invested in new technical wizardry and I am now on techie overload.

Mr W thinks we may have entered a new chapter in our lives ...........

This recipe is by the Hairy Bikers from the television series Mums Know Best and is on the BBC Food Website.

QUICHE LORRAINE

I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of quiche lorraine but my husband loves it, and so with this in mind, I decided to try yet another recipe. This time the recipe came from the Hairy Bikers.

We loved this quiche, it was bursting with flavour and would be perfect for feeding a crowd. It's fairly rich and so you could get away with serving small portions.

The photograph shows I have overcooked the quiche (the filling went past the 'wobble' stage), this was in part due to the recipe not being specific about the tin size - it says one large tin! I used a 23cm tin and it really only needs a 20cm tin to give a deep quiche.

A green salad to serve with the quiche, as they suggest, would be perfect. For us though it was quiche, green salad and coleslaw.


The coleslaw is a Jamie Oliver recipe and I know I will make this time and time again. Much much better than those small tubs from the supermarket. Jamie's recipe makes a huge bowlful.