Strawberry Smoothie

 Today the sun has been shining and there have also been clouds.  Sous Chef J decided he needed a summery drink to 'get into summer' so decided to make a smoothie.

As is good practice, he gathered the ingredients (but forgot the orange juice in this pic) then set about preparing his Vitamin C packed drink of delight.

It's a simple to make concoction.  He puts all the ingredients into a container then whizzes them with the Braun Hand Blender (although, after seeing a Vitamix demo at last week's Good Food Show, he keeps telling me one of their blenders would be better!!)

Using a handful of hulled strawberries, juice of one orange and a whole ripe banana as a base he added a squirt of lemon, a squeeze of runny honey, a splodge of natural (home made) yoghurt and a dash of vanilla extract.

Then WHIZZZZZZZ.  Pour out into "suitable receptacles" and enjoy!

Banana Bread

Sous Chef J was delighted to get a SUSTRANS leaflet through the post about Free Range Kids.  In it he quickly spotted a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe for Banana Bread and, eyeing up the spotty bananas on the windowsill, he asked if we could bake it.  Taking a look at the ingredients, I agreed, although we did have to swap the apricots in the recipe for dates... and, of course, the self raising flour was substituted by Dove's Farm Gluten Free Self Raising Flour.

With Sous Chef J firmly in charge, preparation commenced.  He got the ingredients together and weighed out the things that were needed. So, we assembled 75g sultanas, one lemon, 100g soft unsalted butter, 125g sugar (recipe says caster, we had granulated), 2 large eggs, 3 large ripe bananas, 200g self raising flour (we used Dove's Farm Gluten Free Self Raising) and 75g dried dates (although recipe says ready to eat apricots!).

Then Sous Chef J moved onto the task of making the dates the same size as sultanas... but was surprisingly adept at the task and completed it without a moan!




The sultanas and dates were placed into little pots (a la MasterChef) and I was told to cream the butter and sugar.  Next an egg was added to the butter/sugar mix and combined well before repeating with the remaining egg.  At this point, the dried fruit and lemon zest were added and mixed in.

Sous Chef J then mashed the three bananas and added them to the mix.  Finally, the sifted Gluten Free Self Raising flour was carefully combined using a metal spoon. 

Next, the whole lot was added to the lined loaf tin and placed in the pre-heated oven.  As we were cooking other things in the oven, the temperature was higher (at 180ºC) than the recipe's stated 160ºC so we have a rather more brown outer loaf than would be expected!

Mmmmm... lovely Banana Bread

We checked it after 50 minutes but returned it for another 15 minutes as the inserted knife came out with cake mix on... then checked again, repeating until the knife blade came out clean.  In the end it was baked for about an hour and a quarter.  It was cooled in the tin for 15 minutes, then turned onto a wire cooling rack.

Delicious!  And well worth the wait.

Update - 7 October

Today we found ourselves with three VERY ripe bananas so Sous Chef J thought another batch of Banana Bread would be a good way to use them up.  I had other ideas and convinced him to try making muffins instead.  So, we agreed on a mix of muffins and mini muffins. The mix was shared between 12 muffin cases and 6 mini muffin cases.  The mini muffins were cooked for about 10 minutes, whereas the muffins took around 20 minutes.  Here are some pictures to show the results.

 

These are some ready to be frozen as we like to be prepared with Gluten Free goodies!

Fish, Chips and Peas

It was a delight to be sent a packet of Isabel's Gluten Free Batter Mix by the lovely @Bels_Doughballs the other week.  Sous Chef J was keen to get testing and tasting and it was the perfect excuse to make our version of the Yorkshire classic - fish, chips and (not) mushy peas!

This is what we needed to make up batter with 125g of the mix - half a packet.  Yes, just 160ml of cold water.  The mix lists its ingredients as rice starch, cassava starch, brown rice flour, disodium biphosphate, sodium bicarbonate and salt).

Sous Chef J quickly got to work adding the water to the batter mix and attempted to be a speed hand mixer.  Having worked his magic, we had a lovely consistency of batter ready for action.  However, before we sorted out the fish, we put half of the batter mix into another bowl... more on that later!

The fish had been cut into thick fingers and these were coated in the batter.  Having heated some vegetable oil, the battered fish was added and cooking commenced.






After a few minutes, the batter turned an attractive caramel colour and the fish was removed and drained on a piece of kitchen paper.

After the addition of some steamed sugarsnap peas and our special spicy potato wedges it was time for Sous Chef J to taste test... whilst I got on with a little treat for pud.

Having split the batter mix into two, I decided to try to make deep fried bananas with the remaining half.  Admittedly, the bananas used were rather ripe but using the same technique as for the fish (albeit with fresh oil) the result was these... served with a dollop of home made crème fraiche and sprinkle of sesame seeds.

And, Sous Chef J's verdict?

We thoroughly enjoyed our take on fish, chips and peas and the pud was tasty too... but we will be using underripe bananas for deep frying in future!

Thank you @Bels_Doughballs for thinking of us and introducing another simple mix to our Gluten Free cooking options.