Sweet Potato

Sweet potatoes are fast becoming my favourite vegetable. Their starchiness makes them excellent accompaniments chipped, mashed or roasted in cubes. However their sweetness and soft texture mean they can stand as a vegetable in their own right in a stew, soup or salad.

One of the best combinations that you must try is sweet potato, blue cheese and cos lettuce leaves:

There is crunch and soft and sweetness and creaminess - it’s really lovely. Jumble it all up for a wondrous salad or load up the cubes of filling in a lettuce leaf boat for some hand to mouth eating. 

Even though it’s an effortlessly easy construction it actually seems and tastes rather sophisticated and could be pulled off as a fancy starter or canapé. Perhaps with the addition of some toasted walnuts or frazzled bacon bits?

I prepared mine by baking a few sweet potatoes and then scooping the softened flesh on to the lettuce leaves, crumbling over the blue cheese and drizzling with some reduced balsamic vinegar. Wishing I’d bought some bacon to scatter over the plate I snipped up some of the crisped potato skin instead. It was an ok addition but bacon would be better.

My other favourite sweet potato dish is a spanish stew. A tomato, paprika spiced base is home to nuggets of salty, chewy chorizo which is lovingly complimented with soft butter-beans and the star - roasted sweet potato. We ate ours with a mountain of torn chunks of crusty bread, but it could also have been served with mashed potato, cous-cous or a green salad. Very nice and warming it was. A nod to autumn but embracing the coming winter also.

Spanish Stew

serves 4

3 large sweet potatoes, cubed

1 red onion, roughly chopped

4 garlic cloves, sliced

1 chorizo sausage sliced in to coins

1x400g tinned tomatoes

1x400g tin of butter beans

1tsp - paprika

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C.
2. Peel and chop the sweet potato then drizzle with oil and sprinkle with paprika and seasoning in a baking tray. Roast for 20-25 minutes or until soft and slightly caramelised.
3. Meanwhile, chop up the onion and garlic and fry gently in a large saucepan.
4. When softened, add the chorizo and fry for a further 5 minutes.
5. Pour in the chopped tomatoes and the drained butter beans and let everything bubble for 5 minutes. 
6. Then add the sweet potato and a splash of water. When reduced to desired consistency serve piping hot!

Apple Cake

Sundays can be tough as a student. Campus is dead. Everyone’s asleep. You feel a nasty, nagging pressure to do some work. You don’t do any work. It’s usually the day a family member rings you from your favourite cafe back home, munching on a baked good. Or from the sofa tucked up with the cat, casually mentioning that there is a roast chicken in the oven…

Such homesickness, boredom and just plain hunger incited me to bake a cake today. Inspired by the spectacular autumnal produce at London’s Borough food market - which I made my first visit to last Friday - I settled on the idea of baking a toffee apple crumble cake. A recipe that has been floating around in my head since the beginning of October.

The market got me so hot and excited. I lunched on the plentiful free samples; cheese cubes, saucisson, lumps of bread dunked in different oils and vinegars, slithers of smoked fish, crumbled fudge, granola clusters and hot, lemongrass tea.

Other than baking a cake, I think the next best homesickness cure is to get out of town for a day or two. Get a bit o’ culture down you - some art, music or food from somewhere new. Then going to back to uni can sort of feel like you’re coming home again…

I am sorry, but this cake is bloody sublime. The soft, vanilla spiced sponge suspends sweet, translucent and almost jelly-like cubes of syrupy apple. All these varying layers of soft contrast with the crunchy topping; a crumble that melts in the mouth like honeycomb and the edges of the cake that touch the sides of the tin have crisped into a golden, buttery crust. Oh. My. Lord.

Toffee Apple Crumble Cake

Cake:

2 Apples, peeled and cubed

Half a lemon

4 tbsp - Soft brown sugar

1 big lump of butter

200g - Sugar

200g - Butter

2 Eggs

200g - Self-raising flour

1tsp - Vanilla extract

Crumble:

100g - Flour

50g - Butter

50g - Soft brown sugar

1. Preheat oven to 180’C
2. Heat about 50 ml of cold water in a sauce pan. Add the apple and squeeze over the lemon. When the water begins to boil, chuck in the butter and sugar. Let it bubble away for up to 10 mins then leave to cool.
3. Cream the butter and sugar. When smooth, add the vanilla.
4. Beat in the eggs - It’ll go lumpy like scrambled eggs - then mix in the flour until smooth once more.
5. Stir in the cooled apple, reserving the syrup. 
6. Pour mixture in to prepared cake tin (I used a rectangular 20cm x 10cm tin, but your average circular tin will work too.)
7. In a bowl, rub the butter into the flour and sugar to make the crumble. Make it as fine or as pebbly as you wish.
8. Sprinkle the crumble over the cake evenly. Then drizzle over the reserved syrup and bake for 25-30 mins or until a skewer comes out clean.