Friday 29 August - Crab Cakes with Chilli Jam

I've always wanted to make crab cakes, but most recipes I've looked at include just silly amounts of white crabmeat. However, I found a lovely looking recipe in a Sarah Raven book that just called for crabmeat, so I bought a couple dressed crabs, plus a few extra claws.

We started by making the chilli jam to serve with them, this also had the advantage of using up lots of our homegrown tomatoes.

Our own chillies also went into this-they are lovely and hot this year.

Chillies, garlic and ginger were processed along with half of the tomatoes.

Red wine wine gar and fish sauce were added, and then the rest of the tomatoes roughly chopped, along with some sugar. Then it was all cooked until lovely and thick and sticky 

Plenty of this left over for another day too.

For the cakes, the crabmeat was mixes with mayonnaise, breadcrumbs, hopped herbs and chillies, and some Worcester sauce and lemon juice.

It was all bound together with an egg yolk, before forming into cakes and into the fridge to firm up before we coated them in egg and breadcrumbs.

They were then shallow fried, before being served with chips and the chilli jam.

Tuesday 25 August - Swedish Meatballs

We were inspired to make these by a visit to IKEA . Although we've never had meatballs there, they seemed to be popular there so we thought we'd have a go. Although there were frozen ones on offer, we decided to have a go ourselves, although this vital accompaniment was purchased on the way out

I googled lots of recipes, and the main differences were whether to add dill or not. I decided to add it ( a decision that George wasn't happy with.

Lots of dill and parsley were finely chopped.

These were added to a fairly basic meatball mix- pork, eggs, dried breadcrumbs, some milk and salt and pepper.

I rolled this mixture into fairly small balls, and they were fried in olive oil.

The sauce was made, by adding flour to the fat left in the pan, along with a spoonful of the jam, some beef stock, cream and lemon juice.

then the meatballs went back in, and were simmered for a while to heat through.

Served with mash, and more of the jam, and I thought they were delicious - teenagers may prefer them with no dill though.

Tuesday 18 August - Ma Po Tofu

II had never heard of this, but it was requested by George who is a bit of a Tofu fan - it's basically a spicy pork mince stirfry, with cubes of tofu added at the end.

The recipe started in the same way as many stirfries do - ginger, garlic and spring onion were added to the wok.

Then in with some  lean pork mince and some roughly chopped fermented black beans

Once these were all fried together, some spicy chilli bean paste was added and cooked for a few minutes.

Then the cubed tofu - I had pressed this for a while to get rid of excess moisture to stop it falling apart.

Finally in went some cornflour and stock, flavoured with soy, sesame and some sugar

Garnished with spring onion, and served with lots and lots of steamed rice