A Modern way to Cook by Anna Jones

Always last to jump on a bandwagon (or anything for that matter - I didn't realise I had to do anything with my eyebrows until I was well into my 20s, and dealing with bushy eyebrows is no bandwagon issue), I have only recently come across Anna Jones. Friend and erstwhile employee of Jamie Oliver; Slender of leg, blonde of hair, vegetarian wholefood enthusiast...

You might have thought I'd be more than a little dismissive. I am, after all the person who sent Deliciously Ella back whence it came (my mum) a few short months ago for reasons too numerous to mention (oh, OK then - I found it irritatingly smug, couldn't connect to the writing style or the writer, there was, frankly, far too much quinoa in the first few pages for her to be credible, and what I really wanted was Diana Henry's 'A Bird in the Hand' but obviously I hadn't been hinting hard enough.)

But we're not talking about Deliciously Ella or A Bird in the Hand (although I will return to Diana Henry in a later blog). We're talking about Anna Jones and A Modern Way to Cook and, swoon, my latest food crush.

I'm never going to be a vegetarian but I flirt with reducing the amount of meat in our diet for numerous reasons. I am conscious that there are calories and there are calories and I need to make them count. A Modern Way to Cook seems to tick both boxes. There are many vegetarian cookery books that I've tried and enjoyed but are very cream and cheese laden, thus defeating the object of my latest quest to make my calories count in the right way. Anna Jones' approach to food seems to be easy and straightforward. Ditch the refined sugar, choose alternatives to dairy, cut out the meat. Yes, my cupboards now groan with a wider selection of pulses and unrefined sugar options (Agave syrup, anyone) but get your head around that and you're laughing. And feeling lighter and generally more energetic. Really. Couple this shift in culinary preferences with a surprisingly successful Dry January and I'm feeling perkier than I can ever remember for this time of year which usually drags me right down. To top it all - and probably crucial to this feeling of well being - is that I don't feel like I've been hard done by in the food department. AND I'm half a stone lighter than I was at the end of December.

So what have I cooked? Admittedly, I've majored on the baking section in A Modern Way to Eat - I am after all trying to lose a bit of weight, but I love a treat, so if I can make the contents of my cake tins healthier, that's got to be a good thing. There's a totally divine 'Ultimate Pecan Banana Bread' combining bananas, oats, pecans, maple syrup - as a connoisseur of banana loaf this comes in very close to the top of my list of banana loaves to bake; 

A Carrot Cake Flapjack which somehow combines the best of both carrot cake and flapjack without eggs, flour or refined sugar; 

Dark Chocolate Goodness Cookies - who would have believed you could use cannellini beans to such amazing effect?! If you've read any of my blog before, you'll know how much of a cake fan I am. Of course, these don't taste the same as my usual bakes, but different is good, and I am converted.

I served up celeriac, bay and mushroom ragu the other evening - it disappeared. And if comfort food is what you need, rhubarb apple and maple pan crumble is a revelation - scrummy crumble topping with none of the heaviness to leave you groaning afterwards for hours...

Honeyed rye bread was delicious (despite a slightly over-enthusiastic crust - it's a few months since I've baked bread and I need to get my mojo back) especially topped with avocado and roasted tomatoes with a cheeky fried egg on the side.

And if this is all seeming like it's too good to be true, well, I have had one disaster. I made some lush kale pesto (inspired by lunch in a local cafe, of which more another time) and decided to 'knock up' some chick pea pasta - from A Modern Way to Cook - to serve it with. The very idea of 'knocking up' fresh pasta, chickpea or otherwise, on a week night when I was tried from work and had hungry mouths to feed, shows just how much confidence Ms Jones had instilled in me. Of course I ended up with a sticky unworkable disaster that I had to chuck away before reaching for the dried pasta. But I feel this was probably more down to user error than anything else. My chickpea flour was somewhat old, and I didn't have ground flax seed as required, so tried to whizz up ordinary flax seed in a food processor to use instead. Disaster, disaster, but I will try it again another day.

There are still plenty of the recipes in A Modern Way to Cook that feel a little too worthy for me, a step too far down the road to kale oblivion, but I'm getting over that. Anna Jones puts together really delicious flavour combinations, and her useful charts suggesting combinations for salads and the like are worth digesting (pun intended). My meal plan for this week includes lentils with roast tomatoes and horseradish, and I can't wait to try frying pan Turkish flatbreads with spoon salad. Some of the ingredients are something of a challenge to locate here in very rural West Wales, but there are ways around that. In the same way that Nigella seems to instil the confidence to experiment, so I feel I can enter our local health food shop, Go Mango in Cardigan, with my head held high and ask if they might possibly stock freekeh...


So, in conclusion, A Modern Way to Eat - definitely worth a read. Certainly worth an experiment. A worthy addition to any shelf of cookery books. But you probably already knew that, didn't you...

Banoffee Cake

Another Clandestine Cake Club meeting - that came round quick...

Our venue was the beautiful Hammet House Hotel set on the banks of the River Teifi just outside the village of Llechryd - modern luxury in Grade II listed Georgian splendour - how lucky were we?

The theme for the evening was 'Brilliant Banana Bake Off'. I've never cooked a banana cake that wasn't in loaf form, and so determined to produce something more cake-like, I sourced a round version - but couldn't give up the addition of tinned caramel...

The first time I ever had banoffee pie, that glorious combination of broken biscuit base, bananas, caramel, I was about 13. We were at a big family party 'down south' - lots of older second cousins around, and the glamour of it all was almost too much to bear - as was my encounter with the banoffee pie. There was no sorry end, no gorging resulting in horrible after effects, but for someone who had only ever experienced banana tarted up with (a) milk and brown sugar (b) yoghurt and hot chocolate powder or (c) custard, you'll appreciate that the presentation of it in a pie, with the glory of caramel, and in this initial encounter, (as I recall) a liberal amount of cream, it was sophistication that I hadn't even dreamt of - and given that boys didn't feature much in my life at that stage, it was about the most exciting thing I had come across. Ever.


The thing about banoffee though, is that it is very rich. Sickly, even. And while I may often scoff at people who suggest only a small piece of a particular cake, this is just that.  Really. On the plus side it is incredibly easy to make. And given that I had to knock it up after an awesome but exhausting weekend camping on the Gower peninsular in a gale, that was definitely a good thing.

Banoffee Cake

200g soft unsalted butter
100g light muscovado sugar
100g soft brown sugar (or 200g of either one)
4 large eggs
2 ripe bananas, broken into chunks & mashed up
75g walnut pieces, chopped
200g self raising flour

for the icing
150g soft unsalted butter
250g icing sugar
2 tbsp tinned caramel or dulce de leche
8 walnut halves
fudge pieces

Grease & line a 20cm cake tin and pre-heat the oven to 180C

Cream together the butter and butter for about 5 minutes till light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition, then beat in the mashed banana. It may look quite curdled but don't worry.

Fold in the flour and chopped walnuts, then scrape into the prepared tin and pop in the oven.

Bake for 40-45 minutes till golden on top and a skewer comes out clean.

Leave to cool.

To ice, add the butter to a bowl, sift in the icing sugar, add the caramel and beat together to make a smooth creamy icing. Spread this over the cold cake, decorate with walnut halves and fudge pieces.

Have a small slice. Especially if eating as one of a selection of banana cakes - who'd have thought they came in so many different guises?

A full write up of the evening will appear on the Clandestine Cake Club's site soon!

Condensed Milk in 'Beaker-Gate' Shocker (and another banana loaf recipe)

The other day I made Dan Lepard's ultra delicious Lemon Butter Cake, which requires 125g condensed milk.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that this left me with 272g condensed milk (give or take). By the way, why are the tins 397g? Does anyone know? Are they really 400g but state a weight which allows for the bits that you can never get out, even with your finger a spatula? Would it be too hard to make a tin that tiny bit bigger? Big enough to carry a full 400g? This is something I genuinely wonder about, so if anyone can enlighten me, please do.

But back to the matter in hand. What to do with 272g of condensed milk? I pondered the question idly on social media and received a number of suggestions, including drinking it in tea, making it into a sandwich and using it as a sex aid (this was the day of 'beaker-gate', after all). I had been contemplating nothing more complicated than a quiet corner and a teaspoon, but only in a half hearted sort of way: not only can I no longer drink 10 pints, dance till dawn, consume a doner kebab with extra hot chilli sauce and survive the next day; it seems that I can no longer face eating most of a tin of condensed milk. Age is a cruel mistress.

 So I did not consume the condensed milk. Oh no. I conscientiously decanted it into a mug (a mug, note, NOT a beaker...), popped some clingfilm on the top and consigned it to the fridge. Now in this house the Husband and I have one of those 'standing jokes that's not really a joke' which has developed over the course of our life together. I hate to throw food away, so anything that can't be frozen in a little convenient portion will find its way into the fridge, and I  genuinely, I mean, really GENUINELY, mean to use it again. But it doesn't always happen.

Sometimes I forget.

Sometimes it wasn't actually that nice in the first place.

Sometimes I just want to cook something else.

Sometimes, it disappears to the back of the fridge, only to re-appear weeks later with all sorts of interesting mould growing on it.

Sometimes, I really do use it.

When we're clearing up after a meal, the phrase you're most likely to hear him say is "Shall I throw this away now, or put it in the fridge and throw it away in a week's time" . You get the idea.

This particular 272g of condensed milk (give or take - I couldn't say for sure that a teaspoon's worth didn't somehow come my way) did get used. It ended up in another version of Banana Loaf. I wish I could settle down to having a 'go to' recipe for things like Banana Loaf, but it seems I can't help fiddling - probably because so much of my baking depends on what's knocking around in the kitchen. I can't even stop fiddling with the flapjacks I swore were the best I'd ever made. In case you're interested, it's worth swapping some of the oats for dessicated coconut...

Another Banana Loaf

100g chopped dried fruit - I used apricots and a mixture of currants, sultanas and mixed peel that was in a value bag of dried fruit I bought last Christmas for mincemeat/Christmas pudding purposes...
100ml black lapsang souchong tea (what I made at breakfast time - Earl Grey would be good too)
100g unsalted butter
272g condensed milk (give or take - obviously, a teaspoonful either way isn't going to make much difference, so go on, treat yourself...)
225g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb
about 350g (peeled weight) mushy bananas
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs

Soak the dried fruit in the tea - probably an hour minimum, or longer - I started mine off at breakfast then baked the loaf at tea time.

Pre-heat the oven to 180 C and line a large loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

In a large pan, gently melt together the butter and condensed milk, stirring occasionally.  While this is going on, measure your flour, baking powder and bicarb and mix together. Mash up the banana with the vanilla extract, then beat in the eggs with a fork.

Beat the mashed banana & egg mixture into the melted butter and condensed milk, stir in the soaked fruit, then finally, stir in the flour about 1/3 at a time.

Scrape into the loaf tin and bake for about 45 minutes to an hour till a cake tester comes out pretty much clean. Keep an eye on it - if it looks like it might catch, cover lightly with some foil or something.

Leave to cool in the tin.

It will smell delicious - and (and now I really am getting old) it tastes delicious with a nice cup of tea...

Not another Banana Loaf recipe??

Does the world really need another banana loaf recipe?

Well, my blog, my rules, and I says you do.

In preparation for making my Random Recipe entry the other week, I needed soft bananas. Unusual to actually plan to have overripe bananas - normally, banana cake in one form or another is the result of an unscheduled glut, rather than the reverse, but I didn't read the miscalculated how many bananas I would need for the Harry Eastwood recipe, so didn't upset the culinary world order too much, and ended up making another banana loaf using the left over overripe bananas. 

I have been drinking rather a lot of lapsang souchong tea recently. Black. No sugar, no lemon. Get me, with my poncy tea habits. It all came about as the result of trying to find an acceptable calorie free beverage for my 5:2 diet days (consigned to the cupboard under the stairs for the time being), and I'm quite addicted. I usually have a mug of it at breakfast, which often features banana (the breakfast). While contemplating additional banana loaves, a strange thought came over me, or rather a chain of strange thoughts which resulted in me wondering how I could incorporate the flavour of the lapsang into a banana loaf.

If you've been having the same thoughts, you are not alone, and I'm here to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Don't say I never do anything for you. I have to say that this didn't really give me as strong a flavour of the tea as I wanted, but there's a certain satisfactory smokiness to this loaf that I really like. It also helpfully uses up any tinned caramel you might have hanging around. Not as much as the Banana Caramel Loaf, but, you know, enough.

Another Banana Loaf

130g raisins
100ml hot strong lapsang souchong tea
175g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder 1/2 trsp bicarb
1/2 tsp salt
125g butter
100g tinned caramel
2 large eggs
approx 300g overripe bananas (peeled weight)
1tsp vanilla extract

Soak the raisins in the tea for an hour or so - longer if you have time. Line a 2lb loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and gently melt the butter and caramel together. Set aside to cool while you sort out the rest of the ingredients.

Sift together the dry ingredients. Drain the raisins.

In a large bowl, beat together the melted butter and caramel with a wooden spoon, then beat in the banana. Yes, it's sloppy, but go with it.  

Beat in the eggs.

Stir in the raisins and vanilla extract, then lastly, fold in the dry ingredients, a third at a time.

Scrape the micture into your lined loaf tin and bake for between 1hr - 1hr15 mins till a skewer/cake tester comes out clean.

Leave to cool in the tin. 

Gratifyingly, this has gone down particularly well with the kids. Take note.

Healthy & Happy Banana Cinammon Loaf (with secret courgette) - a Random Recipe

The lovely Dom has been indisposed in rather an unpleasant way recently, so to make up for it, his Random Recipes challenge this month is to cook something 'Healthy & Happy'.

I must confess that my recipe is not quite so random as some of my previous entries, as I have very clear views as to what 'healthy & happy' means, basically that cake has to be involved. 

A salad may be healthy and tasty , and piece of grilled meat could be healthy and juicy, but 'healthy and happy'? Well, cake it has to be.


As a result, there was only one book on my shelf I could reach for, Harry Eastwood's "Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache" which I have delved into a couple of times recently. Basically a load of cake with veg - hidden or not.

For added randomness, I allowed Pink the privilege of choosing the recipe, and for her to have chosen this one is pretty random because it includes bananas which, in her own words "Well, I do like them Mummy, I just don't like the idea of them so I have to forget that it's a banana and then I like it." Nothing like a 7 year old's random views, is there? It also includes courgette which she avowedly detests. This is a big problem in our house, where courgette is on the menu pretty much from June (we've had courgette in the veg box for the last couple of weeks, and our own plants are growing nicely, thank you). May be she felt that if it was in a cake, it would be OK.


Well, she was right, if she did think that. You really can't tell there's any courgette in it. It's light and tasty and there's absolutely no hint of hidden veg. It's actually less banana-y than other banana loaves too, so perfect for those less enamoured with them. I made a Nigella based banana loaf at the same time which includes about 3 times the amount of banana, and consequently is much more so. 

There is no fat in the cake, in the form of butter or oil. Instead, you whisk up sugar and eggs, whisk in the banana then the courgette, then the dry ingredients (rice flour - gluten free) and finally some chopped nuts. 45 minutes in the oven and Bob, as they say, is your happy and healthy banana loaf.

2 delicious banana loaves - can you tell which is hiding courgette?

I made no changes to the recipe other than to use all brazil nuts instead of pecans and brazils, so I don't feel I can reproduce it here, but if you get a chance, do have a look at this book. This is the Banana Cinammon Loaf.

And now, I must fly - off for more 'healthy' at a pilates class. That's 'healthy and painful' by the way...