This recipe originated from the BBC Good Food 101 Slow cooker favourites but I didn’t have any sloe gin and my neighbour kindly offered me some Damson Gin. I’ve never seen a Sloe berry or Damson, but according to Google ‘Damsons are about twice the size of sloes and usually sweet enough to eat, like a plum, sloes are very sour and dry and if you eat them the inside of your mouth will shrivel up and fall out.’
Ingredients:
2 bottles of red wine
2 large cinnamon sticks
4 star anise
8 cloves
4 strips lemon zest, use a potato peeler
6 tbsp caster sugar
200 ml of Damson Gin (could easily substitute slow gin)
Method:
Pour all the ingredients in the slow cooker, mix and cook on High for 2 hours or 4 hours on Low. Perfect for this time of year.
One perk of being a parent blogger is sometimes I get invited to do some interesting things. The lovely Nick Coffer from Weekend Kitchen on BBC 3 Counties radio invited me into his show this weekend. Each week he has a panel of 3 experts; a chef, a wine expert and an enthusiastic home cook. I’m not really sure how I sneaked on the panel.
It was quite amusing that I was invited in as I’m not known for my cooking prowess, but I’m a slow cooker fanatic and have been called the slow cooker queen on a couple of occasions.
Between the 3 of us we had quite a feast complimented by some very tasty wines. The theme was Guy Fawkes Night. We had Welsh rarebit (I panicked slightly as I thought they said rabbit), a sausage casserole, a bean casserole with squeaky cheese, blueberry crème brûlée and my now infamous Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake or should I say ‘stiffy’ Toffee Pudding…..yes, I did say stiffy on the radio and here’s proof!
When I was first asked to some on the show, I knew I had to make a main dish, which wasn’t a problem but when the lovely producer Emma emailed me and asked which pudding I would be doing, I panicked. As a family, we don’t really eat puddings as we don’t have sweet teeth and I’ve never made a ‘proper’ cake before. However, I rallied to the challenge, hit Google and came up with a recipe.
Too cut a long story short, it took three attempts to get a cake that was vaguely acceptable. The first one went straight into the bin, it didn’t rise and at one point there was smoke billowing out of the cooker. I thought the second one was a bit overdone and the apple slices on top had sunk like the Titanic.
As, I’m a huge fan of slow cooking someone suggested doing one in the slow cooker, so, at 10.30 pm the night before I had a go. However, as it was done in foil and once it is finished you had to turn it upside down on a plate, we had no idea until right before the show whether it worked or not and to say the least….it didn’t. The only way I can describe it is that it resembled ‘dog food that just slid out of the tin’ in both texture and colour.
Thank goodness I had decided to take cake number two in as a back up and in the end it was quite nice. It was a Spiced Toffee Apple Cake, which I found on the BBC Good Food Website. I should have quit while I was ahead.
Thanks to Nick and Emma for a great day and fabulous experience. One I will never forget.
Last week I flew up to Edinburgh to learn how to cook fish. The Scottish Taxi driver thought this was truly hysterical, ‘why would a Canadian bird from London come all the way to Edinburgh to learn how to cook fish? What is there to learn, you just dip it in batter and fry it, we fry everything in Scotland including Mars Bars’.
It was an absolutely brilliant day! We started with a Champagne reception at Loch Fyne, followed by a tour of a fishmongers and we were then whisked off to Martin Wishart’s Cook School for a Master Class by the lovely Jacqueline O’Donnell from Glasgow’s famous Sisters restaurant.
She showed us how to prepare 3 simple fish recipes; including a scrumptiously easy Mackerel pâté, quick fish in foil and a seafood broth that one of the women said tasted fishy????? Before she set us loose in the kitchen she showed us how to filet a fish, I have to say I made a complete pigs ear of it. I think Jacqueline’s face in the picture says it all, it was more of a fish finger than a fillet, which resulted in fits of laughter.
The trip was to mark the start of Seafish’s new campaign ‘Fish is Easy’ to encourage families to eat more fish from sustainable stocks. Over the next few months I’ll be sent a selection of fish, vegetables and recipes to try out with their support so watch this space.
Disclosure: All expenses for this trip were met by Seafish
I’m always waffling on about my slow cooker as I use it at least 3 times a week and couldn’t live without it as a working mum. People are often asking me for my recipes. I do have a selection of tried and tested Slow Cooker Recipes here on the blog but I can’t recommend these two books enough as I use them weekly as you can see by how tattered they are.
In fact, the two books are one in the same the larger one, weirdly, only has 100 recipes while the smaller has 200 but they’re by the same author and overlap. However, if you’re buying it for a gift the larger one would be nicer.
They’ve completely opened my world up to the possibilities. Slow cookers aren’t just for making beef stew. Here are a few of my favourite recipes from the book.
Spiced Lamb Tagine
Abruzzi Lamb
Frikadeller (Danish Meatballs)
Lamb Rogan Josh
Sausages with Onion Gravy
Grean Bean Risotto with Pesto
Swordfish Bourride
Thai Green Chicken Curry
The smaller one is currently on sale on Amazon for about £4.
Disclosure: Being completely cheeky but I’ve used my own affiliate code so if you do buy it I get a few pence. Why not as I’m giving them a bit of free advertising!
This recipe originated from the BBC Good Food 101 Slow cooker favourites but I didn’t have any sloe gin and my neighbour kindly offered me some Damson Gin. I’ve never seen a Sloe berry or Damson, but according to Google ‘Damsons are about twice the size of sloes and usually sweet enough to eat, like a plum, sloes are very sour and dry and if you eat them the inside of your mouth will shrivel up and fall out.’
