We’ve been enjoying local polytunnel-grown strawberries while we are waiting for ours to ripen.  It’s a good idea to make the most of what’s in season, so apart from eating lots of them just as they are, or with yoghurt or ice-cream, I’ve also devised this Strawberry Cheesecake recipe.

Tracy’s Baked Strawberry Cheesecake 

You’ll need to make this the day before you want to eat it.

Ingredients:

50g organic butter

200g chocolate chip biscuits (crushed in a food processor or by hand)

2 cartons Devon Gold curd cheese

1 carton Cornish clotted cream

75g unrefined golden caster sugar

25g cornflour

3 free-range organic eggs, beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract with vanilla seeds

200g fresh strawberries, sliced

Preheat the oven to 170′C (gas mark 3).  Grease and line with baking parchment a loose-bottomed 18cm diameter cake tin. To make the base, melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the crushed biscuits until they are well combined.  Press the biscuit crumb mixture into the base of the cake tin.  Leave to chill in the fridge while you get the cheesecake mixture ready.

Put the curd cheese and cream in a mixing bowl and mix well (I used a fork and really beat this together).  Beat in the icing sugar and cornflour, and then add the eggs and vanilla extract, and beat it well until its smooth.  Stir in the sliced strawberries and then pour the mixture onto the biscuit base.

Cook in a preheated oven for 35-40 minutes (don’t let it get too brown).  When it’s done, turn the oven off and leave the cake in it to cool for about 2 hours.  When cool, transfer to the fridge to chill completely.  When it’s chilled, you can carefully remove the cake from the tin and voila.  Decorate with more sliced strawberries and dust with icing sugar.

As the strawberries lose their colour in cooking, it might be an idea to try this with raspberries or other berries for more colour. 

All the best for the New Year to our friends and visitors.  2007 has promise written all over it.  We have a few green resolutions for New Year, namely finally fitting the Water Two valve and putting down the long awaited leaky-pipe irrigation hoses in our back garden, attached to our water butts.   We also have plans to further insulate our loft, up to 30cms.

But, on to more jovial matters, and our New Year’s Eve gathering.  We had such a terrific night.  Good friends, good food and lots of fun.

The children painted and played before dinner.

And for dinner we had bobotie, begrafnis-rys, roast butternut, green bean curry and chutney, followed by fruit salad.  Thanks to Neill for making the bobotie and to Lindy for the fruit salad.

So here’s to 2007, may it be a good one! 

I ordered a ham from a farm in the next village for our Christmas lunch, and will drive through the fog tomorrow to fetch it.  Peter is unable to contemplate a meat-free Christmas, but in our effort to reduce our footprint on the Earth, we are having a very local ham and a vegetarian Mushroom Wellington (from The Cranks Bible) instead of our usual wild boar and ham.  I will also be stopping in at the local farm shop for our sprouts, carrots and parsnips that will be roasted together, and potatoes for our roasties.  Unfortunately there will have to be a trip to the supermarket too (we don’t have any local grocery shops left in our village, apart from a tiny Co-op) to stock up on booze, Green & Black’s chocolate, and other bits and pieces for the weekend and Christmas Day.  Mental note to self: don’t forget the loo paper - recycled, of course!

 Piper’s your girl for peeling brussels sprouts.

I’ve only recently discovered butternut, in the sense that I’ve always avoided it for some reason, until now, that is.  Perhaps my tastes are changing and I’m learning to like sweeter vegetables as I get older.  Anyway, I was looking for some good butternut recipes online, and these look truly scrumptious indeed.

Vegetarian Roast Dinner from bean-sprouts 

Boerewors and Butternut Risotto from Cook Sister! 

Yesterday was "Day 1" of Christmas preparation in our house.  I decided to start baking some Stollen to freeze for eating when the "season" hits us.  My mom’s terrific Stollen recipe calls for 500g of cake mix (mixed fruit for fruit cakes and the like) and so I duly headed off to Waitrose to see what I could get.  Always conscious of what goes into our mouths, I read the ingredients on the back of the bag.  Currants, raisins, sultanas, candied peel (all sounds fine so far), and hydrogenated vegetable oil.  What is the point of adding that to some dried fruit?  I just don’t get it.  Needless to say, the bag of fruit mix was unceremoniously dumped back on the shelf, and I bought a selection of raisins, sultanas, dried cherries and prunes to make up my own, better, fruit cake mix.  None of these contain hydrogenated vegetable oil, of course.

My fruit mix has been soaking in armagnac overnight, and the baking will start today.  Stand by for the recipe and pictures!

Our spinach beet is growing beautifully at the allotment and it’s time to start eating it.  These pasties were inspired by the recipe for Chard Pasties in the Five-a-Day Fruit & Vegetable Cookbook.

450g spinach beet, trimmed and chopped including stalks
2 tbsp butter
2 small or 1 large onion, finely chopped
10 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
80g Gruyere cheese, grated
1/2 to 1 cup fresh brown breadcrumbs
6 tbsp single cream

For the pastry:
2 1/2 cups plain flour
generous 1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
beaten egg, for glazing 

To make the pastry, place the flour in a mixing bowl and rub in the butter.  Add the grated cheddar cheese and a little cold water to mix to a soft dough.  Add extra flour if the dough gets to sticky.  Knead gently on a floured surface.  Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Place spinach beet chopped leaves and stalks into a heavy-bottomed pan, cover and cook over a low heat for 8 minutes until the stalks are tender and the leaves wilted, shaking the pan occasionally.  Strain, pressing out the excess liquid and place in a mixing bowl to cool.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the onion and bacon until the onion is lightly golden and the bacon is browned.

Add the onion and bacon to the spinach beet and stir in the Gruyere, breadcrumbs, cream and seasoning to taste.  Preheat the oven to 220′C/Gas 6.

Divide the pastry into four and roll out into rounds.  Spoon the filling onto the centre of each and dampen the edges with water.  Bring the sides together over the filling and press together to seal.  Brush with beaten egg and then put on a non-stick baking tray.  Bake for about 20 minutes until the pastry is golden.  With the leftover edges of the pastry rounds that I cut out, I rolled two smaller rounds and with a little filling saved, made two mini-pasties for the children. 

Here’s a recipe using cherry tomatoes and courgette, it was an experiment that turned out great!

50g pine nuts
pudding bowl full of cherry tomatoes, halved
1 medium sized yellow courgette, sliced
50g goats cheese
drizzle of sunflower oil
drizzle of balsamic vinegar
spaghetti

Put the pine nuts into a heated pan and stir until they go golden, then set aside and get the spaghetti cooking.  While spaghetti is boiling, drizzle oil over the courgette and cherry tomatoes and roast at gas mark 6 for 10 minutes.  Drain pasta and remove vegetables from oven.  Mix spaghetti into the roasting pan and add diced/crumbled goats cheese and the toasted pine nuts.  Finally, drizzle with some balsamic vinegar, mix together and serve. 

The next picking of cherry tomatoes from our crop of tumblers will be the last.  I picked a large bowlful  for our dinner of roast cherry tomatoes, courgettes and pasta tonight.  And so we are now into cherry tomato decline. 

But the next lot, the beef tomatoes, are starting to redden, so we’ll graduate to stuffed toms and greek salads by next week.  Mmmm! 

The courgette glut continues… I’ve tried the chocolate courgette cake recipe, what a disaster.  It didn’t rise for some reason.  I’m usually pretty good at baking cakes, but this one has me worried.

The Irish Marrow Chutney has been bottled up.  It needs to be matured for a few months before eating, so I’ll report back on that later in the year.

Tonight we’re having baked courgettes stuffed with goats cheese, along with our very first cauliflower (probably with a cheesy bacon sauce) and green beans (our Blauhildes are coming thick and fast). 

The courgettes are glutting, and I’ve been trying out some new recipes.  This is from The Complete South African Book of Food and Cookery, with some amendments.  Very popular in our house.

3 large courgettes, thickly sliced
2 tbs olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
500g minced lamb
1 tsp flour
1/2 tsp dried oregano
200ml vegetable stock (or whatever you have available)
freshly ground black pepper
brown sugar
red wine vinegar
3 large tomatoes, peeled and thickly sliced
2 tbs grated Parmesan cheese
2 tbs soft breadcrumbs

Sauce:
2 tbs butter
2tbs flour
300ml milk
salt & freshly ground black pepper
100g feta cheese, crumbled
2 egg yolks, beaten 

Put courgette slices into a colander and sprinkle liberally with salt.  Leave 30 minutes to drain, then rinse and dry slices on recycled paper towels.  Heat oil in a frying pan and saute courgettes until golden on both sides.  Remove courgettes with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Add onion and garlic to the pan and cook gently until soft.  Turn up heat, add mince and cook until it changes colour, stirring and breaking up lumps with a fork.  Sprinkle with flour and oregano and stir in, then add stock and season to taste with salt and pepper.  Cook gently for a few minutes, stirring once or twice.  Taste and add a touch of brown sugar and vinegar as needed.

Make the sauce: melt butter in a saucepan, add flour and cook, stirring, on gentle heat for 1 minute.  Remove from heat, cool a little, add warm milk, stirring until smoothly blended.  Return to heat and stir until boiling.  Season with salt and pepper, then stir in feta cheese, remove from heat and whisk in egg yolks.  Stir 2 tbs of sauce into meat mixture.

Turn meat mixture into a greased, wide but fairly deep ovenproof dish.  Arrange tomatoes in a layer on top, then courgette slices on tomatoes.  Pour cheese sauce over courgette and sprinkle with Parmesan and breadcrumbs.  Bake in a preheated moderately hot oven (190′C/Gas 5) for 30 minutes or until top is golden brown.  Serves 6.

Happy Summer Solstice to everyone!  We will be having a barbecue tonight, spending the evening outdoors and letting the children stay up late with the sun.