A pear cake for Autumn

 Pears, a most perplexing and petulant fruit; one day they are hard enough to knock someone out at 100 paces, the next they are the fruit equivalent of a tumbling toddler - soft, squidgy, bruised and in need of immediate attention.

And so it was that the 2 pears that had been ripening gradually in our fruit bowl, suddenly accelerated towards fruit fly Heaven and were caught at the very last moment.

Too soft for poaching in red wine or lemon and cinnamon scented sryrup, too little space in the freezer for a granita, so they headed into a cake.  And, quite frankly, I think this is the best cake of 2020, so far.

120g butter

120g soft brown sugar

90g marmalade - I uised home made, but if you don't have homemade, try to use one that is not overly sweet.

2 eggs

120g self raising flour

4 tsp of ground ginger (more or less to taste)

2 large ripe pears, cored and chopped (no need to peel, although you can if you wish.  Mine were beyond the point at which peeling was an option)

Heat the oven to 170ºC and grease a 1lb loaf tin

Beat together the butter, sugar and marmalade until very light, then add the eggs and beat again, as hard as you like.

Fold in the flour and ginger and finally, the chopped pears.

Spoon the mix into the loaf tin and bake for around 40 minutes, until a skewer poked into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

If the top of the cake is browning too quickly, cover with a piece of foil, baking parchment or a discarded butter wrapper.

Leave aside until the tin is cool enough to handle without an oven glove and then turn the cake out onto a cooling rack.

When cool, dust with icing sugar and tuck in.

Whilst nice on its own, I reckon this would also make a good dessert with ice cream, whipped cream or yogurt.

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

Blueberry, lime and coconut cake

Something sweet, but not too sweet, and simple for an afternoon tea or dolloped with a little creme fraiche for dessert.
There is nothing complicated about this cake, just a variation on a classic sponge mix, combining some of our favourite flavours and using a bargain punnet of blueberries from the reduced section in the supermarket.

120g butter
60g sugar
2 eggs
60g coconut flour
100g plain yogurt
100g self raising flour
grated zest and juice of a lime
170g blueberries
2 tsp sugar

Heat the oven to 170ºC and grease an 8½" cake tin

Beat the butter and sugar until soft and pale in colour, then whip in the yogury, mixing until it is all well combined.  Mix in the coconut flour and the lime zest.
Add the eggs and beat well.
Fold in the flour and 100g of blueberries and spoon the batter into the prepared cake tin.
Bake for 25 minutes until it passes the skewer test.

Meanwhile place the remaining blueberries into a small saucepan (a copper saucepan is not esssential, but it is deal for this) with approx 20ml wateer nad the sugar.  Heat gently until the blueberries soften and start to bleed juice into the water and the sugar dissolves.  REmove from theh eat ad add the lime juice.
Taste, you want these to be on the sour side to contrast with the sweet cake.
Take the cooked cake out of the oven and spoon over the cooked blueberries with all the juice.
Leave the cake to cool and absorb all of the juice before carefully turning out on to a serving plate.
Serve with a cup of tea or a glass of fizz.

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

Apricot custard flan

Who remembers holidays, travel, being elsewhere, being carefree?
Whilst we are returning to some kind of normal, some of the things we used to take for granted are not going to be back on the agenda for a while.
And whilst we DID take our holiday travels for granted, we do acknowledge that this is a privilege and one that not everyone shares.

One of my most potent memories is of a hotel in Saas-Fé in Switzerland, sadly no longer family owned, where we enjoyed fresh apricot jam for breakfast each morning.  Small batches were made on an almost daily basis, and wherever we roamed in the region there were roadside stalls selling punnets of sunset coloured fruit.
Apricots are one of our favourite fruits, but they need a bit of coaxing to bring out their best, a bit of heat and they sing, when they are so often a woolly, dry disappointment eaten raw.

Memories were evoked and imagination stirred when I picked up a couple of punnets from our local farm shop and this custard flan was demolished in a flash.

20 apricots (plums would work well too)
2 lavender heads (optional)
Sugar to taste (we used 40g)

1 egg
60g butter
60g sugar
60g self raising flour

30g cornflour
45g sugar
350ml full fat milk
50 ml double cream
2 egg yolks

Start by cooking the apricots; halve and stone them and put them in a single layer, if possible,in an ovenproof dish (I used a prospector pan). Sprinkle over the sugar and finely chopped lavender heads.  Bake in a moderate oven, around 180ºC for about 20 minutes, until soft, but still just about holding their shape - think tipsy, but still able to stand :-)

Once they are in the oven, make the cake base.  Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then incorporate the egg and beat again.  Fold in the flour and spread the mix into a cake tin (Our cake tin has a diameter of 8½" or 22cm).  Pop into the oven with the apricots nad cook for 15 minutes.

Now tackle the custard layer.
Place most of the milk and the cream into a saucepan, extravanagant, I know, but our copper pans are wonderful for custard making and heat gently to just boiling.
Mix the cornflour and sugar t a paste with the rest of the milk.  Pour the hot milk over the cornflour slurry and mix thoroughly.  Returnto the pan and cook until the sauce is nice and thick. Lower the heat and add the beaten egg yolks, stirring vigourously.
Remove from the heat and transfer the custard to a jug or bowl to cool.
Spread the cooled custard over the sponge base - it should be thick enough to uphold the fruit - the ncarefully arrange the apricot halves over the top.
Chill for a couple of hours, but remove from the fridge about half an hour before serving.

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

Toffee and dried fruit custard tart

Baking in lockdown has been a challenge and a balm; ingredients have not always been readily available, but the joy of immersing oneself in the tactile joy of making pastry, the olfactory bliss of toffee and the sheer concentration in note taking, blocking out interference in the brain from the clamour of coronavirus news is unrivalled.
It has also been a time for seeing what we have in the cupboard and working out ways to use up stored ingredients.
This is an elaboration, a variation, dare I say, an improvement of a recipe my mother used to make when I was a child.  It is, without a shadow of a doubt, an indulgence, but it is easy to make and right now, we all deserve a treat.

Pastry
150g plain flour
60g cold butter, cubed
Cold water

Filling
30g butter
120g brown sugar
2 eggs
200ml double cream
120g dried fruit*

Preheat the oven to 175ºC

Make the pastry; rub the butter into the flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
Bind together with just enough water to make a stiff dough.
Roll out on a floured board to fit either a 10" prospector pan, which is all I had to hand in lockdown, or a 10" pie dish, I should be getting one of these back in the Netherton kitchen any day now.  
Place in the fridge while you make the filling.


* I keep a jam jar full of dried fruit; raisins, currants, sultanas, dried citrus peel, soaking in sherry in the cupboard and used some of these for this dish, but booze free fruit is quite acceptable.

Put the butter into a saucepan (our copper pans are perfect for this) or a milk pan and melt over a gentle heat.  Stir in the brown sugar and the fruit.  Beat the eggs and cream together and add to the fruit mix.  Pour all of this into the pastry case and pop it into the oven.
Cook for 30 minutes until the filling has just set - a little wibble is a good thing, it will firm up as it cools.

Cool and serve in small slices; it is pretty rich and you can easily get 8-10 slices from this size of pie.

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

Corona conversations

With the shops re-opening and 91 days of corona conversations recorded, we have decided it is time to halt the daily updates.
From no until "normality" resumes, we will be posting regular, but no longer daily, reports on our Facebook page


DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC WE ARE KEEPING A DAILY DIARY OVER ON OUR WEBSITE.

PLEASE CHECK OUT OUR CORONA CONVERSATIONS FOR FUN FACTS, PRETTY PICTURES, NEWS AND VIEWS, HEROES AND VILLAINS.

STAY SAFE, KEEP WELL, 

MIND THE GAP!

Old Mother Hubbard

I started to write this before the lockdown, before the pandemic, the panic buying, the upsurge of home bakers and new home cooks, clearing the shelves, invading the internet, sweeping the supermarkets more effectively than Rylan has ever witnessed.  Some of the shopping and cooking dynamics have changed, society has changed, daily life has changed; for good, for bad, forever? Who knows? 
But even so, most of this still applies, so in many ways, life goes on as normal and we have to cling to familiarity where we can.

Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard was notable for being bare.  For most of us, this is not something we have to face, but for those on low incomes, living in poverty, it is a daily reality.
Food banks offer temporary respite, but it is shameful that in a country comfortably within the world's top ten economies that there should be a need for these.
It should be the right of everyone to eat well; food should be more than staving off hunger, it should nourish the soul as well as the body.  Jack Monroe, who has experienced poverty and hunger, has written some stunning books which set a new benchmark for the "cooking on a budget" theme.  There is no pride in poverty, but there ought to be dignity.

If you have enough to eat, be grateful, be generous, challenge and question those in power.  The Trussell Trust website will point you in the right direction.

But for the rest of us, the notion of having nothing to eat is the culinary equivalent to claiming we have nothing to wear; standing in front of the kitchen cupboards is like facing the black hole, rimmed with indecision and a complete lack of initiative and imagination, that sits between you and the overstuffed wardrobe.

What we really mean is that our minds cannot translate the shelves of ingredients into the coherence of a meal.  Personally, I love the challenge of a fridge forage and a pantry purge, scooping up anything to hand and creating something from a seemingly disparate and desperate collection of bits and bobs.  Even so, "wait and see", is a handy answer when the reaction to a casual enquiry about the day's dinner results in brain freezing panic.

Perhaps the prevalence of these culinary mental blocks one of the reasons why Ready Steady Cook is so popular. So popular, in fact, that it returned to our screens recently, fronted by the irrespressible Rylan Clark-Neal, two mentions in one post! - with new chefs, including our friend Romy Gill.  

And another source of inspiration is Nigel Slater  - in particular we love his Greenfeast books, which list the recipes by no more than 3 principal ingredients.

  

And if you are struggling with what you have in the cupboard, you can head over to Gemma Wade on Instagram who is full of ideas and advice.

Or write to us at sales@nethgerton-foundry.co.uk and we will see what we can come up with.

Stay safe, keep well, stay positive.

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk

SY23 - a restaurant in Aberystwyth

It was quite a journey to get there, even more of a journey home through sleet, hail and snow, across the Welsh hills to avoid the floods in the valleys below.
But it was well worth it to be the first to talk about SY23; named after Aberystwyth's post code and home of Nathan Davies' new restaurant, which opened just over 2 months ago.

And whilst I refuse to use the word journey in anything other than a travelling context, this has been quite an experience for Nathan too.  After 4 years of working at the acclaimed, Michelin starred restaurant Ynyshir, under the tour de force that is Gareth Ward and surviving the razor sharp scrutiny of Grace Dent, he has moved down the road and stepped up to the challenge of running his own place.

A big jump into a small place, but a place that can genuinely be described as having Nathan's DNA all over it.
SY23 is small, but, as the saying goes, perfectly formed; a cosy downstairs bar, the dark blue paint creating an intimate atmosphere, redolent of a prohibition speakeasy, but with the class and styling of velvet chairs, highly polished, dark wood tables and fresh flowers, leads out to a twisting staircase, illuminated by the sexiest of chandeliers to a dining space made by Nathan, with a little help from his friends.
And when I say "made", I do mean "made", not feng shui'd from purchased parts!
As Nathan himself said, "lots of people open restaurants, I built mine".

Take a closer look at the open cooking area, everything is on view, where you can see your meal being cooked.  All of that open fire set up was made, from scratch, by Nathan; in his words, he is better than the average welder.

Two of the tabletops have been converted by one of his friends, from the seasoned wood of a fallen oak, the hollow centre artfully filled with resin.  As ever, it's not what you know, but who you know; in this case it happens to be Steve McFall, aka Bespoke Mcbloke. These fabulous pieces of timber are supported on metal legs made by, guess who, yes, that man Nathan.  The rest of the tables are made from reclaimed wood atop Nathan's legs, so to speak, and will eventually be replaced by more bespoke tops.

Look even closer at that open cooking area and last week you would have seen that he is running a restaurant, with 24 covers, with only 2 frying pans and had you looked closer you would have seen that they are both  Netherton Foundry frying pans.  His stock has now increased by 50% with the addition of one of our prospector pans!  Just goes to show that it's all about having just the right amount of exactly the right kit.

The money saved by making his own fire pit and tables meant that he was able to buy seriously comfy chairs.  That may sound like a no-brainer, but how often have you fidgetted through dinner on a hard chair or read Jay Rayner or his readers complaining about the seating and how it detracted from the food? 

Seats are important, this is what Mr Rayner he wrote in one review, where thankfully his nether regions were as well catered for as his stomach.  

"The seats are comfortable. Going from some of the comments online on these reviews, that is a matter of serious concern to a certain portion of the readership."

And this is all part of the restaurant's core ethos - to give people a good night out.  Truly great wines are offered at accessible prices; this is by no means a cheap restaurant, but it does offer true value for the money you pay.  At the time of writing the set menu of seven perfectly judged courses  is priced at £48.  Don't write to us, shout at the restaurant or whine on review sites and social media if that's not the price when you visit.  

The menu has been conceived to give you a great dinner, with the price reflecting the quality of the ingredients and the cooking.  
The wines have been priced competitively, so that your drinks bill doesn't leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

And let's talk about the food.
Over the course of an entertaining conversation, we learned that the only thing Nathan doesn't enjoy is raw oysters; it used to be all raw fish, but he is coming round to some of it, just not the oysters - cook them first!  
But fish has paid a large part in his life, with fond memories of a teenage life lived on the coast, with access to a small boat and fishing lines, he spent many an hour out on the water bringing home a catch.  And now he buys his fish direct from the boats.  If they haven't got what he'd planned to cook, he will change the menu, rather than buy elsewhere.

He can still recall, I don't know why I say still, he's not that old even now, the first meal he cooked.  As a teenager he served his family fresh tomato soup with pesto, a boiled ham with vegetables and a chocolate tart, recipe from Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef, which despite his conviction of having followed the recipe exactly, didn't set.    
As an aside, Jamie Oliver was "discovered" when working at the River Cafe in London and it is rumoured that no-one has ever managed to make their Chocolate Nemesis recipe successfully - perhaps there is a link.

Nathan is trying to source all the ingredients as locally as possible; he makes bread from wheat grown and milled down the road, has a number of local, organic fruit and veg suppliers, is working on dairy supplies, Wales is better known for its sheep than its cows, and relationships are being forged with local farmers and butchers for high quality meat.
Then, of course, there is the abundance of food to be foraged from forest, field and hedgerow.  Birch trees are tapped for birch water, which will be simmered down to create birch syrup; a complex, rich almost curranty taste, which we got to sample neat. Soon the wild garlic will be harvested and pickled, fermented and added to oil.  It will be a full year of seasons and harvests before Nathan has accumulated the larder filled with the jars that he wants to enhance his dishes.  These are not things you can ring up the wholesaler and order on a next day delivery.  Time is the key ingredient here.

The menus are changed every two weeks and are not advertised on line.  It is a set menu, although with advance notice, they can take dietary restrictions into account.  Learning from Gareth, and confident in his ability to create delicious food, Nathan presents a succession of dishes designed to fit together like a jigsaw, so that when the last piece is finally in place, there is a feeling of satisfaction.  If you start tinkering withe the pieces, the picture is going to be skewed. 

If you got to SY23, and we think you should, let us know what you think.  If you send us a review, we may even publish it!

Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2020 ©

www.netherton-foundry.co.uk