Prune, Banana and Oat Cookie Biscuits

I’ve made a lot of biscuits in the last year or so. Sidney eats a lot of fruit for his snacks, but you can’t beat a biscuit for satisfying little tummies, and they don’t have to be sugar-laden – there are plenty of healthy biscuit recipes out there. Often I cut the quantity of sugar in recipes by half or even less. I just don’t think everything has to be so sweet all the time and fortunately the taste buds of my family agree.

The great thing about biscuits, apart from their simplicity, is that you can often make up a dough and freeze half to bake another time. Batch cooking saved me a lot of time when Sidney was very small and meant I almost always had something in the freezer for emergencies. They’re also really handy for days out, and I usually bake a batch to take on holiday, or if we visit Sidney’s grandparents in France, so that I know he’s got healthy snacks if we’re on the move.

My go-to book for biscuit recipes is Miranda Gore Browne’s Biscuit. It has a range of recipes for grown-ups and little people, and Miranda bakes for her own children, so the sugar quantities aren’t crazy and there are lots of relatively healthy recipes in there.

Miranda appeared in the second series of Bake Off and I haven’t baked a dud recipe from her book yet. Some of my favourites include the Marmite Morsels, which are made with wholemeal flour, cheese and Marmite, and which were probably the first biscuits I started making for Sidney; the Honey Oatcakes, made with wholemeal flour and oats; my current favourites, the Seriously Seedy Biscuits, which I made with pumpkin, sunflower, chia and sesame seeds and which make the most delicious, light crispy biscuits; the Elegant Pistachio Puffs, which the French in-laws loved so much they took the recipe back to France with them; and the super handy Honey Biscuits, which are so simple and quick to cook from store cupboard ingredients you can have light, crumbly honey biscuits whipped up and baked in 15 minutes.

Sometimes, however, you just want to whip something up with what you have to hand. This recipe was inspired by a packet of prunes I’d bought for Sidney that had somehow been contaminated and were covered in mould. I cleaned off all the mould and figured they’d be fine to eat (I watched a BBC programme recently that said mould on fruit will pretty much never do you any great harm, and I would rather clean off mould rather than waste good food whenever possible), but I was still a bit nervous about giving it to Sidney, so I thought I’d bake it into a biscuit.

The thing to remember about making up recipes is that if you stick to the general ratios, you’ll rarely go too far wrong. The standard ratio for a biscuit is 1:1:1, or 1-part flour, 1-part fat, 1-part sugar. For a cookie it’s 3:2:1, or 3-parts flour, 2-parts fat, 1 part sugar. Vary the ratios and you’ll get a slightly different texture, or flavour.

These are more like chewy cookies than crisp biscuits. I used bananas because, again, I had them to hand. If you’ve got more bananas you’ll get a gooier dough, so cook the biscuits on a lower heat for longer to help them dry out. The dry ingredients are oats, ground almonds and desiccated coconut, which also adds to the sweetness along with the fruit. The good thing about chewy biscuits for toddlers, especially young ones, is that they tend to hold together during the eating. You might get half a crumbly biscuit into the mouth of a small person, the other half left in a trail of crumbs from the kitchen, through the living room and out into the garden (Sidney likes to eat on the move). Keep it a little bit sticky and you’ve got a much better chance of getting it into their bellies.

Here’s my very simple recipe.

Prune, Banana and Oat Cookie Biscuits

Makes about 16

2 ripe bananas (about 150g)

100g prunes

100g oats

50g ground almonds

50g desiccated coconut

¼ tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 160°C fan/gas 4. Line 2 baking sheets with silicone mats or baking paper.

Put all your ingredients into a bowl and mix together with a wooden spoon. Roll up teaspoonfuls of the mixture into balls, then space them out on the lined baking sheets and press down with your fingers until they’re about 5mm thick. They can be a little thicker, but they’re quite wet, so you want them thin enough to dry out in the oven.

Bake for about 25 minutes, checking them after 20 minutes or so to make sure they’re not catching at the edges. If you want dryer biscuits, just leave them in a little longer. They should be nice and brown once they’re cooked, with a slight crunch on the top. Transfer to a wire rack to cool and store in an airtight container.

 

Miranda Gore Browne blogs here. Biscuit is published by Ebury Press.

Yellow Courgette and Sweetcorn Curry – two ways

Autumn might feel like it’s arrived early, but I can’t deny that this is probably my favourite season for cooking. I love chopping big chunky autumn vegetables and chucking them in a pot to slowly cook down into something earthy and wonderful.

This is a really versatile recipe. You can pretty much chuck anything in, as long as you remember the yellow theme when you choose your ingredients. Add a carrot or two, toast some cumin seeds and add them to the pot, or some chilli powder. I made mine pretty mild, but it would be really good with some chilli kick.

The inspiration for this curry is our giant monster of a courgette plant. Early in the summer it quietly started to flower and we had a couple of pretty small courgettes to nibble on. Then we went away for a few days and it sprung to life, providing plenty of beautiful yellow vegetables for me to experiment with. Then we went away again and returned to this!

Around this time, of course, the markets are full of beautiful, sweet cobs of corn, and I figured it might be nice to stick with the yellow theme and make a soup for me and Sidney. I added turmeric and onion, a squeeze of lemon and a stick of celery, coriander being the only green allowed. It made a delicious summer soup, with an almost coconut flavour.

The soup reminded me of curries I’d had travelling in Asia, and here in Vietnamese restaurants, often accompanied by cashew nuts and chicken. So I made my own version, which is the second recipe here and which could be made with a variety of ingredients; it would be really tasty with mushrooms instead of chicken, for example, or with some chopped fresh chillies.

Thick Yellow Courgette and Sweetcorn Curry Soup

Serves 4

1 corn cob, leaves removed

200g basmati rice

a big knob of butter

1 onion, diced

2 carrots, chopped

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2cm piece ginger, chopped

4 or 5 yellow courgettes (or 1 giant one), sliced or chopped

1 celery stick, sliced

a small bunch of fresh coriander, chopped

1 tsp turmeric

50g mixed seeds, such as pumpkin and sunflower

100ml crème fraîche

a squeeze of lemon juice

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put a pan of boiling water on the heat and cook your corn cob for a few minutes until plump. Remove the cob from the pan and set aside to cool a little, then slice the corn off the cob. Cook the rice in the water in which you cooked the corn.

Put a large heavy bottomed pan over a medium heat and melt the butter. Add the chopped onion and carrots and cook until softened. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for a minute, then add the courgettes and celery and cook until browned. Add the chopped coriander, most of the sweetcorn, scatter the turmeric over the top and season to taste. Stir the whole thing together and leave to cook down for about 10 minutes.

In a separate pan toast the seeds, then add half to the curry mixture and transfer the whole thing to a blender, or use a hand blender, and whizz up until smooth. Stir the crème fraîche into the soup with a squeeze of lemon.

Spoon the rice into bowls and top with the soup and a dollop of crème fraiched. Scatter the remaining sweetcorn and seeds over the top and serve.

Yellow Courgette, Sweetcorn and Chicken Curry

Serves 4

1 corn cob, leaves removed

500g free-range chicken pieces (or 400g boneless)

50g butter

1 onion, diced

4 or 5 yellow courgettes (or 1 giant one), sliced or chopped

1 celery stick, sliced

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2cm piece ginger, chopped

a large bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
1 x 400g tin coconut milk

1 tsp turmeric

50g cashew nuts

50g mixed seeds, such as pumpkin and sunflower

extra-virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

basmati rice, to serve

Put a pan of boiling water on the heat and cook your corn cob for a few minutes until plump. Remove the cob from the pan and set aside to cool a little, then slice the corn off the cob.

Put a large heavy bottomed pan over a high heat and melt a little oil. Add your chicken and sear on all sides. Transfer the chicken to a plate and lower the heat to medium-low.

Melt the butter in the pan and add the chopped onion. Cook until softened and then transfer to the plate with the chicken. Add the chopped courgettes and celery to the pan and cook until browned. Tip them onto the plate with the chicken and onions.

Add the chopped garlic and ginger to the pan and cook for a minute, then tip the chicken, onion, courgette and celery back into the pan along with the sweetcorn, half the chopped coriander and the coconut milk. Scatter the turmeric over the top and season to taste.

Stir the whole thing together, put a lid on the pan if you have one, and leave to cook down for about 10 minutes. (If you don’t have something you can use for a lid you can add a ladleful of water later on to thin out the mixture.)

Cook the rice in the water in which you cooked the corn.

In a separate pan toast the cashew nuts and seeds. If you have small children you can bash these up or put them in a blender.

Take the chicken pieces out of the mixture and set aside on a warm plate. Add half the toasted nuts and seeds to the curry mixture, then transfer to a blender, or use a hand blender, and whizz up to a smooth paste.

Spoon the rice onto a serving plate, top with chicken pieces and spoon the curry mixture over the top. Scatter the remaining coriander over the curry and top with the remaining toasted nuts and seeds.

Cheap and Cheerful Tomato Crumble

At the end of our holiday in Brittany we spent a few days in Laval with Seb’s good friends, Thomas and Laeticia. We’ve stayed with them a few times now and I love their home. Laeticia has a colourful Lavallois family history; she comes from a family of seed growers from the town and inherited the family home via a priest uncle who passed on the modest payment for the property to his congregation.

It’s a sprawling house above an opticians near the city centre, with a walled kitchen garden and rickety old shed out back. Having studied catering and worked in restaurants, both changed careers in their late-twenties to become carers – she for young people with learning disabilities, he for psychiatric patients at the hospital – so they weren’t rolling in cash when they took on the old building, but I love what they’ve done with it, scrubbing back the wooden floors and giving the whole place a good lick of primary coloured paint.

Not only did they inherit the house, but also the vintage family furniture. I pine for the Formica table relegated to the laundry room and original features like the mid-century taps in the spare room. Plus they have all the memorabilia from the seed-growing years. Their breakfast bar is plastered with old seed packets, which made a handy learning/distraction tool for a hungry toddler learning his vegetables.

In typically French fashion, I’m reminded every time I visit Laval that life is food, and life is love. And food with love is the icing on the cake. Which is great for us because we eat well every time we go there. Thomas was vegetarian for many years, so the pair have an impressive repertoire of cheap but delicious vegetarian food, including the cherry tomato crumble we were treated to on this particular trip.

The tomatoes, of course, came from the garden, carefully collected by Sidney and ourselves, then tipped  unceremoniously over the mud before being painstakingly returned to the basket, one tomato at a time. With all the French sunshine they must have had throughout the summer they were sweet to the point where it could have felt like we were eating a dessert if it weren’t for the balsamic vinegar and cheesy crumble.

It’s such a cheap and tasty dish, I decided to make it again at home. I used plum tomatoes because I couldn’t resist them at the market, but they also made a slightly more savoury pudding, which I liked. I also added fresh thyme from the garden – again, to temper the sweetness of the tomatoes – and swapped white flour for wholemeal.

Here’s my recipe:

Cheap and Cheerful Tomato Crumble

Serves 4

1kg ripe tomatoes, chopped into big chunks (halved if cherry)

500g shallots, peeled and quartered

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

a few sprigs of thyme, leaves separated

150g wholemeal flour

100g butter, cubed

75g Parmesan, grated

75g goats’ cheese, sliced

extra-virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 150°C/gas 2.

Scatter the chopped tomatoes and shallots over the base of a casserole or baking dish and toss with the balsamic vinegar and half the thyme leaves. Season to taste (I just add pepper and let the Parmesan in the crumble provide the saltiness) and bake for 1 hour. Take the dish out of the oven and turn up the heat to 220°C/gas 7.

Rub together the flour, butter and half the grated Parmesan with your fingers until you have a breadcrumb consistency. Scatter over the cooked tomatoes and onions and lay the slices of goats’ cheese over the top. Scatter over the remaining thyme leaves and Parmesan. Bake for a further 30 minutes, until the top is crispy and golden brown.

Serve with something neutral like fresh salad leaves and green peas to balance the richness of the crumble.