Apple Chilli Sauce

After a glut of apples this year I was struggling a little to come up with other uses for them. After pies, jams and stews there didn't seem a lot more I could do. Some might say I shouldn't have taken a whole bag full of free apples from the neighbour, but turning down free food isn't in my nature.

It occurred to me some time ago that apples might make a good base for a chilli sauce. Pete got quite enthusiastic about making his own chilli sauces when he got some chipotles, and I wanted a fruitier, green version.

Pete's birthday happened to coincide with the apple surplus, so chilli sauce it was.


You will need:
2-3 small to medium cooking apples
1 large or 2 small onions
1 small jar green Jalapenos (Discovery brand are good)
1 green pepper
1-2 small, mild green chillis
1 lemon (juice and zest)

Peel and chop the onions and apples, and sweat in a saucepan with a little oil. Add the drained Jalapenos, and cook until soft.

In the meantime, chop and de-seed the pepper and chillis, and cover with boiling water. This will soften them but keep them fresh.

Add the peppers and chilli, along with the juice and zest of a lemon.

Once everything is mixed in chuck it all in the blender, and add enough water to make it smooth. Pass it through a sieve and bottle it.


This is a really versatile sauce, and goes particularly well with anything salty.

In praise of Jo, 41, from Essex

The Great British Bake Off is no Great British Menu, but then there are few things I enjoy quite as much as Great British Menu (I have no doubt I’ll write about this too, when the opportunity presents itself). The Great British Bake Off contains fewer egos, more polite judges, and a concept that you'd think I’d get bored of in no time; enthusiastic amateurs compete in various types of bakery until they are whittled down to a single Master Baker. It’s The Apprentice of cakes.

Unlike The Apprentice where the joy comes from seeing arseholes getting their just desserts, the contestants here all seem like really quite nice people (who make their own just desserts). I’m surprised by how much I’ve got involved in it.The shock when both Robert and Jason were chucked out! The roulade fiasco! Mel and Sue! Now I like baking, but this here is a whole other level.

Tonight is the final, and I’m so happy that my absolute favourite contestant has made it this far – Jo, 41, from Essex. She was introduced in the first episode as Jo, 41 from Essex, and she looks so much like someone who is Jo, 41, from Essex, that since then I have only ever referred to her as Jo, 41, from Essex. I love Jo,41, from Essex. I like her face. I like her high voice and estuary accent. I like that she has been an absolute sweetheart from day one, and I like how she was rendered speechless when she got through to the final. For a long time she seemed to fall in more or less the middle of the table, alternating something fantastic with a bit of a disaster, but she’s always made it through. You can see a lot of anxiety in her, so it would be gratifying to see her win. I am unashamedly Team Jo, 41, from Essex.

Unfortunately, she has strong competition. The clever money has got to be on Holly. Right off the bat she has dominated the higher end of the league, but she’s so precise. I don’t like precise. The whole perfectionist thing has obviously worked out well for her so far, but I don’t trust her. Oh, I’m sure she’s perfectly nice, but allow me my prejudices. As far as I can recall she only came close to going home once after a difficult round. In the end they sent home Yasmin instead, but Holly was tearfully telling the camera that now she wanted to go on and win because she felt responsible for Yasmin. She would win for Yasmin. Ugh. I may have shouted at the TV.

The third finalist is Mary-Anne. In any other competition she would have been my favourite, but she can’t quite take the place of Jo, 41, from Essex in my heart. She’s a little more experimental in her cooking, a little more willing to wing it, rarely rattled (even last week when she accidentally put her fancy decorations onto a cake backwards where no one could see it), and with a dry and deadpan sense of humour. I’d be happy to see Mary-Anne win.

Well, kick off is coming up - I'll update with the results shortly

UPDATE: She won! Good for Jo, 41, from Essex. She owned the others, it was beautiful.

The Green, Green Soup of Home

I got the for idea for this (brand new!) soup from one of the seasonal Covent Garden soups that I had recently. It was called English Garden soup, and was made with cucumber, lettuce, celery and mint. It sounded like a great idea, and I'd never heard of usuing cucumber or lettuce in a soup before, but the meal itself was rather disappointing; really quite thin and bland. I figured I could do better.

As it happened the next time I was in the greengrocers I found some massive cucumbers going cheap, and the celery bunches were bigger than usual too. The mint was looking a little ropy, so I decided to plump for parsley instead to take it in a slightly different direction. I also omitted the lettuce because... I don't have a good reason. I'm just not a big fan of lettuce.

As a heads up, what followed was very much based on trial and error. I could give you the recipe of what I did, or I could give you the recipe of what I intend to do next time to make it a little better, but I figure it’s best to give you everything so you can compare and make your own conclusions. Just like the practice of reproducing the Folio and Quarto versions of King Lear alongside each other. That’s right. I went there.

I started off as I start most soups, by frying onions and garlic. I roughly chopped a whole (enormous) cucumber, and a whole head of celery, added salt and pepper and put the lid on to steam for a couple of minutes. I then added enough hot chicken stock to cover the veg – use vegetable stock if you want to keep it vegetarian – and left it to simmer for about 25 minutes. Once everything was soft I added about half a bunch of chopped parsley and blended everything in the food processor. I returned it to the pan and added the rest of the parsley, a handful of frozen peas, and some pre-soaked pearl barley.

This was my basic soup. The celery was a bit overpowering, so in the future I will try to use equal weights of cucumber and celery. The peas and the pearl barley work very well to make it more substantial, and the parsley brings a lovely grassy element, but as it stood it was still a little bland over all. It needed acid, salt, and depth. So I added chopped capers, lemon juice and a few dashes of vermouth. The vermouth was the kicker and really brought the whole thing together, but white wine might do the same job quite nicely.


The final result tasted great. It was green and grassy while still being hearty enough to make a proper meal, but it definitely still needs tweaking. The garlic and the parsley got a bit lost over all, so next time I’ll add them both at the very end to keep them fresh. The texture was pleasantly chunky but a little grainy, so the addition of a potato for extra starch and some more time in the food processor should sort that out. And I need to sort out the balance of the cucumber and celery so it doesn’t turn into a variation of celery soup. I’m also thinking of serving it with a dollop of crème fraiche and chives, but haven’t made up my mind yet.

This is still being workshopped so suggestions are gratefully received. My only stipulation is that it was such a pretty green I don’t want any other strong colours to come along and mess it up, so I’m not going to be adding anything like bacon to it. (Note to self: Bacon in soup? Excellent idea).

I can’t tell you how many this will serve because it produced a whole vat and I lost count of the portions. There was so much soup. So much. I mean, like, you don’t even know.

Oh, the Things I Like

I’ve been making quite a few kitchen acquisitions during my absence. You need to know about them. Obvs.

Giant Wooden Tweezers

Do you know, I genuinely never used to think to myself ‘What I really need is a pair of oversized tweezers in my kitchen’. Weird, right? They are now easily my most used kitchen utensil. Aileen got them for me when we visited the tip shop in Leamington, so I can’t even tell you where you can get them, or even if they have a name beside Giant Wooden Tweezers. Sorry about that. But snap them up if you ever see a pair.

They’re much better than wooden spoons for cooking rice, stir fries or stirring stews, you can use them to easily turn anything on a griddle or when roasting, and it makes lifting chicken out of a roasting pan much more stable so you don’t have to awkwardly use two forks stabbed into a bit of meat to lift, then have it fall back in to the roasting juices and splash on your top (which will never come out) because you thought if you were just getting something out of the oven it’s not worth the bother of putting an apron on. You idiot.

Potato ricer

Ok, this sounds like a frightfully middle class and unnecessary extravagance. A masher should be perfectly serviceable. And it is, but the ricer is better. And cool.

It’s basically a giant garlic press for potatoes. Since I’ve had problems with finding the right sort of garlic press in the past, I was quite specific about the type I wanted – wedge shaped rather than circular, not too many detachable pieces. It was well worth it, and makes some top notch mash.

One thing I would say is that you either need to boil the potatoes until entirely soft, or after you’ve riced them once re-pack it and rice again. I would recommend the latter. You can remember this technique with the handy mnemonic ‘Rice twice. It’s nice’. Combine twice riced potato with a generous proportion of salt and butter and your mash will be unbeatable. By people who don’t have a ricer, that is, cos it won’t beat mine.

Iron Griddle

I recently treated myself to one of these as I was regretting the fact that it was barbeque weather and we don’t have a barbeque (or a garden to put it in, which itself would make the possession of a barbeque somewhat moot). I don’t know what took me so long – it’s brilliant. The only thing I can’t cook on it that I would on a flame is marshmallows, and I’ve always got candles for those. Sure it takes a while, but if I’m in the mood for toasted marshmallows then I’m going to have some toasted marshmallows, damnit.

So far sausages, steak, halloumi and vegetables have all come out beautifully. I’m not a fan of fish but I have no doubt that would work well too. One side effect of my enthusiasm for griddling is my tendency to griddle pretty much everything that comes along. Fancy an apple? No thanks. Griddled apple? Now you’re talking. This should keep me happy until I can do proper outdoor cooking.

Enormous Jar of Skips

I bloody love skips. Like, a lot. For Christmas Pete got me this enormous Kilner jar…

…and filled it with skips (the sauce is there for scale, by the way). He said it takes precisely eleven packs of skips to fill, and as you can see, it is now empty.

The best thing about this present is that on special occasions he will go and refill the Skip Jar. He’s just the best.