Time for Summer Pudding

One of my favourite puddings is Summer Pudding, I try to make one every year. We bought some strawberries and raspberries yesterday so those, plus some cherries we already had and some blackcurrants from our garden have gone into the pudding. Try as I may I can never quite get my puddings to look like the one from my recipe book below but they always taste wonderful.

You need about 11/2 (one and a half) pounds of mixed summer fruit - try to have more red fruit than blue or black as it keeps the lovely berry red colour

Hull the strawberries and raspberries, trim the blackcurrants and stone the cherries and place them in a pan with 4oz caster sugar, the sugar will disolve and the fruit juices run; bring to the boil and keep boiling for about 3 minutes

Meanwhile take about 8 slices of bread and line a 1 1/2 pint pudding basin with the bread pieces

Make sure you overlap and fill in all the gaps. Then, reserving about 4 tablespoons of juice, place the fruit and the rest of the juice in the basin, cover the top with more bread. Place a plate on top so that it fits inside the rim of the basin and weight it down so that the juice soaks into the bread. When cool place in the fridge and leave overnight. If you find some areas of bread haven't soaked through then use the reserved juice to soak into those areas.

Serve with cream, ice cream, creme fraiche or greek yoghurt - Summer on a plate.
Delicious!

A Stirring Sunday

I love this little church at Ilam. There it stands, with its slightly 'higgledy-piggledy' quirkiness, the flat topped Thorpe Cloud in the background. One of my favourite views I think. We walked here this morning by the river, had coffee at the National Trust cafe and chatted, down in the village, to a local lady about the church, the school, the traffic and the weather before setting off back home via Leek and Cheddleton.

In the Church year the last Sunday before Advent is traditionally called ‘stir-up’ Sunday and it is also the day for making Christmas puddings. The term 'stir-up' is taken from the first line of a prayer said on this particular Sunday which begins “Stir up, we beseech thee, oh Lord.” I’d heard of stir-up Sunday but hadn’t realised where the name actually came from and had assumed it was used to mean stirring the puddings and making wishes.

When I was a child my mother made her Christmas pudding on November 5th – Bonfire Night – or within a day or two after. I expect that in today's world many people, like me for the last few years, buy their Christmas puddings and there are so many tasty ones to choose from. This year though, I decided to make a pudding mainly because I found a great recipe in last Saturday’s Guardian Magazine for a 'Plum' Plum Pudding.

This pudding is rich in prunes and fresh plums as well as the usual currants, raisins and spices. Once I’d weighed out the ingredients and chopped the prunes and plums it was so easy to mix together and steamed away happily for three hours. It is now stored away in a cool place and will be steamed for three more hours on Christmas Day.