Christmas – The Bombay Boys

Don’t panic…last minute Christmas present? Make Christmas Jam!

Christmas Jam is just great. It’s cheap, it’s tasty, it shows how thoughtful you’re being by making something so personal and best of all… it is a brilliant red colour! It has the lovely flavours of cranberries, orange and cinnamon with the freshness of strawberries.

It really doesn’t take long to do and here is the recipe:

You will need:600g cranberries, 450g fresh strawberries chopped in to small pieces, 1.2kg of jam sugar with pectin, juice and zest of a large orange, 1 bottle of certo pectin, ground cinnamon and cloves to taste.

Method:

Add one and a half pints of water to the cranberries, orange and zest, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes
Sieve the mixture to get rid of the seeds and skins, really push the mixture through to get the maximum fruit puree (You don’t have to do this if you don’t mind it slightly coarser textured)

return to the heat and add the chopped strawberries and the sugar bring slowly back to the boil
Stir in half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a quarter of ground cloves, taste and add more if you like
Boil hard for 1 minute
Remove from heat, stir in the bottle of certo
Pot in to clean jam jars

This is such a pretty jam and people do like it when you’ve taken the trouble to make something special.

Merry Christmas!

My beautiful bread sauce recipe

Bread sauce is a wonderful thing provided you make it yourself. The bizarre thing is that if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, I actually prefer the Knorr packet variety to the fresh ready-made goo that you can buy in Supermarkets, does that tell you something about my taste buds? Oh well…. I think the key to a great bread sauce is to keep the onions in it, if you cook them very gently and make sure they are finely chopped they make the flavour amazing. The other good thing, is that it freezes really well, so if you make it now, you can just take it out of the freezer on Christmas Eve.

We love bread sauce hot with our turkey on Christmas Day, but most of all we love it cold in the ultimate left-overs Boxing Day sandwich (turkey, bacon, cold stuffing, tomatos, mayonnaise, cranberry sauce and bread sauce – add avocado if you have any knocking around). Trust me, try it before you immediately dismiss the idea! Anyway, for it’s more traditional usage here is my recipe! I have got 10 people for lunch on Christmas Day and I have made double quantities.

Ingredients: 1 small or half of a large, mild white onion, finely chopped (don’t use a red onion, it won’t work), 10 cloves, 10 peppercorns, 1 bayleaf and 2 sprigs of thyme, 500ml full cream milk, 100g butter, 100g of dried white breadcrumbs or cubed, stale white bread, Salt and pepper to taste

To serve: 4 tablespoons double cream, knob of butter (what is a knob? No rude suggestions please! It is approximately 1 teaspoon), fresh grated nutmeg

Method

Melt 100g butter in a saucepan on a low heat and add the finely chopped onion
Sweat the onion gently (that means heat them gently on a low heat, don’t fry them), until soft and translucent for 5 to 10 minutess – do not allow to brown, they should be soft and translucent
Add the cloves, peppercorns, bayleaf and thyme and the milk
Bring to the boil, remove from the heat and stand for at least 2 hours or overnight if preferred
Fish out the herbs, cloves and peppercorns (You’ll be very pleased you counted them!) but leave the lovely soft onion bits in
Place over a low heat and add the breadcrumbs
Bring to the boil
Simmer for 3-4 minutes
IF YOU ARE GOING TO FREEZE YOUR BREAD SAUCE, ALLOW IT TO COOL AND FREEZE NOW
If you’re serving straight away,take off the heat, stir in the double cream and the knob of butter and serve with a sprinkling of nutmeg

If you have defrosted your bread sauce, place in a saucepan and add the 4 tablespoons of cream and the knob of butter and heat gently without boiling and serve as above.

I love these “Pour and Store” bags for freezing or for storing sauces and soups. They are a really handy shape and you can pour things in to them whilst they are still hot.

“It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees..” whilst there’s always a time to listen to Joni Mitchell, now is the time to make your Christmas sauces

Listening to “River” by Joni Mitchell always makes me feel nostalgic and christmassy, and a little bit sad but this really is the time of year when you need to turn off your old nostalgic 70’s songs and think about making bread and cranberry sauce in advance, to be placed in the freezer ready for Christmas day (or you could cook whilst listening to 70’s nostalgia, another option?). You will thank me, when you smugly take them out to defrost the night before and that is just two less things to worry about

Today, however we are starting with the Cranberry Sauce. Fresh cranberries are available in the supermarket from about now, and whilst you can buy bottled or even shop-made cranberry sauce, it is so, so easy to make your own and much more satisfying. I always buy them now, make and freeze the sauce; ready to take out on Christmas Eve.

Ingredients:

150g caster sugar, the Juice and zest of 1 lime and 1 orange, made up to 150 ml with water,

300g fresh cranberries.

Then for serving on the day, you can add the zest of a lime or an orange and if you want a very grown up flavour, 1 tablespoon each of tequila and triple sec which makes it taste deliciously like a cosmopolitan meets margarita. I made this version of the recipe on GMTV and apparently it was very popular!

METHOD:

Add the sugar, water and orange and lime juice and zest to a saucepan

Over a low heat, gently dissolve the sugar and simmer for 2-3 minutes until it is clear and syrupy

Add the cranberries and bring to the boil – this is the best bit as you can hear the beautiful little red berries popping.
Reduce to a simmer for 5 minutes

Remove from the heat, cool and freeze if you wish
Before serving: Add the orange zest and if wanted, the triple sec and vodka

(If you want to make a less alcoholic version but want the flavour, add the booze at the end of the cooking and boil for a further few minutes which will burn off the alcohol but leave the taste)

And that’s it! Watch this space over the next weeks for more Christmas loveliness, bread sauce next week.