Mincemeat is for life…

Until only last week our local supermarket had shelves upon shelves of mincemeat leftover from Christmas. Selling at 5p a jar (10p for the posh stuff), it broke my heart to see these unwanted jars week after week. So of course I did my best to give them a good home, and, faced with a cupboard of pity mincemeat, crumble is what I’m doing with it.

An austere bread and butter pudding

Bread and butter pudding is the quintessential way of stretching out leftovers but this is a particularly stingy effort, made from skimmed milk and not quite enough eggs. The fact it was still delicious, fluffy and custardy, says a lot for bread and butter pudding.

Don’t mind being a gooseberry crumble

I’ve come into some gooseberries. You rarely see these hairy little fruits in the shops and if you do they come in piddly plastic tubs so it’s worth either having a bush yourself or making friends with someone who does. They’ve a short season which is coming to its end so when I heard my husband’s colleague had some going spare, I declared an interest and was rewarded with a carrier bag full of them.

Trifle (or wet cake and custard)

To start my adventures in food blogging I feel I must set my stall out early on an issue which has been vexing me ever since I read this. The offending article suggests that a trifle should not contain jelly. It is not the first time the Guardian has been so delibrately provocative. Indeed, only a year ago did the good Felicity Cloake assert that a trifle should be jellyless and back in 2009 they worried whether jelly was a class issue. Class issue my hundreds and thousands covered arse. It’s a basic food issue. If it hasn’t got a layer of jelly then it’s just soggy cake, covered in a creamy custardy splodge-theres no structural integrity, no definition, in short it’s a disaster.