Toad in the hole – or sausage toad if you prefer – is a great winter dish. Nice thick sausages, a crispy batter and plenty of gravy are perfect for warming up on a cold evening, and it makes for a satisfying meal if you pair it with plenty of veg. It’s very adaptable, too: as I’m vegetarian and Rich isn’t it’s easy to make two individual dishes in separate pans, with Quorn and meat sausages respectively.

Cooking it is no more difficult that cooking your regular sausages, as the time and temperature they require should be the instructions you follow. For us it’s 30 minutes at 200C, but your mileage may vary. If you have both a fan and a non-fan oven, you may find that using the non-fan option helps your batter to rise better.

For two people, start with one egg. Break it into a bowl and weight it. Now add the same weight of milk and plain flour and whisk them all together very well. You want to get plenty of air into the mixture. Keep whisking for three or four minutes until you can see plenty of bubbles in the batter.

If you have time, set it aside for half an hour or so and then give it another whisking before using it, but if not, just arrange your sausages in the lightly-greased tin or tins you’re using, pour the batter around them (it’s best to try not to get the batter all over the top of them so that they still brown in the pan) and then put them in the oven.

They should rise fairly quickly, and if you’ve got your mixture right, they shouldn’t spill over the edges, but support themselves as they climb.

We usually serve ours with a mushroom or onion gravy. Lovely.

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Bread making is one of life’s simpler pleasures. It takes a little bit of effort with all that kneading, and some patience, too, as you wait for the dough to rise, but that makes the result all the more enjoyable.

This time of year, when it’s naturally warmer here in the northern hemisphere, is a great time for bread-making as you can use the warmth in the air to prove your loaves more quickly. With that in mind we decided to bake ourselves a couple of loaves of rosemary and olive bread, using the rosemary from the small shrub we have outside the kitchen door.

Method
Measure your flour into the bowl, sieving it to get rid of any lumps. Add the salt and the butter, which should be finely diced. Add your sliced olives and your freshly snipped rosemary and give it all a good mix.

Flour, salt, olives, butter and rosemary, ready for mixing

Make up the yeast as per the instructions on your particular brand. In our case we mix two teaspoons of dried yeast with one teaspoons of sugar in 150ml of water. This 150ml is taken from our 450ml allocation above.

When the yeast has fermented and got a good head on it, pour it into the flour along with the rest of the warm water and mix it together with the wooden spoon.

When it’s well mixed you need to get the dough in your hands and start kneading. Scatter a work surface with flour to stop it sticking and empty out your dough onto it. Knead it well, pressing into the middle of the dough ball with the heel of your hand and folding the edge into the centre. Do this for at least 10 minutes and then return the dough to the bowl, cover the top of the bowl with cling film and leave it somewhere warm to rise.

On the left, the kneaded dough. On the right, it has doubled in size after rising.

Keep an eye on it. You want it to more or less double in size. As we had put ours in the sun it took about 45 minutes, but it could take as long as two hours. Just make sure it doesn’t get too hot or you could kill the yeast.

When it had doubled in size, kneed it again and then split the dough in half, putting each half in a separate greased loaf tin.

Dough, rising in the tins

Cover them with a damp tea towel and put them somewhere warm again until they have once again doubled in size. They are now ready for baking in an oven for 35 – 45 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius (445 degrees Fahrenheit) until the crusts have browned.

Optionally you could do what we did before baking, and pop a sprig of rosemary on top.

When they have finished baking remove them from the tins, being careful not to burn yourself, and set them on a wire cooling rack to cool.

Rosemary and olive bread

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We both love butternut squash, so when we saw them for sale on the market this weekend at a bargain price we couldn’t resist buying a couple. They are very versatile, and perhaps at their best when you just peel, slice and steam them, but as we had a bit more time for cooking that seemed a bit unadventurous. We decided to make a lasagne. Here’s what we did.

Method
Peel the squash and remove the seeds (if you have chickens, they love them, so give them a treat). Slice the squash into cubes about 1cm in size. Now wash your leeks and slice them lenthwise from top to bottom, then slice the lengths into smaller pieces, again about 1cm in width. Peel and dice a carrot, then put all of your vegetables into a large pan of water and boil for around 10 minutes to soften them up.

Deseeded butternut squash

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and drain your vegetables. Mash half of them and use these to line the bottom of a square or rectangular oven-proof dish, about 20cm (8in) square or equivalent, sprinkle with freshly-chopped rosemary (dried will do if you don’t have your own rosemary bush) then add a layer of pasta sheets and half of your white lasagne sauce. Add the remaining vegetables (not mashed this time so that you get some texture), followed by another layer of lasagne sheets and the remainder of your sauce.

Squash, leek and carrots, ready for the lasagne

Rosemary, freshly cut from the garden

Grate a cheese of your choice over the top. A strong cheese like a very mature cheddar is great as it contrasts well with the sweetness of the squash, but on this occasion we had some double Gloucester that needed using, so we used that instead. It is an orange cheese, so went well with the colour of the squash.

Lasagne ready for baking

Garnish with some more chopped rosemary and then bake in the oven for 30 minutes until the top is browned and the pasta fully cooked through. Serve with a green salad and warmed bread.

The lasagne is baked and ready to eat

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Beer bread is very, very easy to make, and very quick, too. Plus, it needs only three ingredients. It is gloriously simple, and tasty. What’s not to like?

This actually started out as a bit of an experiment – a bit of light relief while we waited for our sourdough starter to grow sufficiently vigorous to bake bread with. Less than an hour later we had a rather wonderful loaf cooling on the rack.

Here’s what you need:

Ingredients
320g self raising flour
320ml beer
3 tablespoons of sugar

So, it’s all threes, and it’s easy to remember how much flour and beer you need as they’re basically the same, although you’re switching grams for millilitres.

We used our home-made beer, which works out at just a few pennies per bottle, so the costs on this one were very low.

Method
Heat the oven to 180 degrees, and while it is warming lightly grease a loaf tin. This is not a loaf you can make by putting the mixture flat on a baking tray as you can with some breads as it is simply too wet. A loaf tin is therefore essential kit.

Sift your flour and put this with the sugar in a large mixing bowl. Pour in the beer and mix well until you have a smooth batter that looks like a good cake mix.

When you can see no lumps of flour any more, pour the mixture into the loaf tin and bake for 50 minutes. By the time it is done, the yeast in the beer will have caused the loaf to rise and the top will be lovely and smooth. It should also be a nice beery brown colour.

Carefully turn it out onto a rack to cool and, when cold, slice and butter to serve. It is sweet and beery, so great eaten on its own, but would not be good in sandwiches.

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Treacle tart is easy to make – particularly with this simple recipe. It’s a good last-minute stand-by for when you have friends coming over, and can be eaten either cold with a cup of tea, or hot with custard for a warming winter dessert.

We had guests around at the weekend. This is what we baked for them, to top off a fish pie and a tomato tart.

Ingredients
Pastry
Four very generous tablespoons of golden syrup
Four medium or three large slices of white bread
Juice and grated rind of half a lemon

Method
Start by making your pastry. For an 8-inch (20cm) round flan tin, follow Blagger’s recipe for pastry. Roll it out on a floured surface and use it to line your well-greased tin.

Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Fahrenheit). While it is heating up, make your bread into breadcrumbs. This is easiest done in a blender if you have one, but can also be done by rubbing dry bread in your hands. Try not to get it too damp and sticky or it will clump together and give you a very lumpy result.

Now put your golden syrup in a non-stick pan and heat it very gently until it turns runny. When runny, stir in the breadcrumbs, lemon juice and rind, and mix well until all of the breadcrumbs are coated with the syrup mixture and you can’t see their white colour any more.

Pour all of this into your pie case and bake it in the oven for 30 minutes, by which point the pastry will be cooked and the filling should be firm.

If you want to eat it right away, be careful: the sugary filling will be very hot.

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I have to admit, our sourdough starter doesn’t look very appealing at the moment. I think that’s probably a good thing, though, as yeast doesn’t look so hot when you’ve started it on the road to fermentation, either.

It’s been growing for a week or so now, and every day I’ve been adding some more flour into the mix to feed the developing culture. Looking at it this morning, it looks rather advanced, and although it doesn’t smell quite as beery as I’d been expecting, it has turned a bit brown on top, as you can see from the picture.

Unfortunately this weekend is a busy one for us so we’re not going to have time to make any bread (missing the point of choosing this way to make it as it’s inherently slower) but now that it looks like it’s pretty much there I’m itching to get needing.

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Sometimes you want to slow right down. That’s half the fun of making your own food, growing your own veg, making clothes or keeping chickens, where you have to wait for the eggs to arrive, rather than running to the shop and picking them up.

I’ve decided to apply this philosophy to bread.

We both eat a lot of bread, making several rounds of sandwiches for our workday lunches, and toast for our eggs and the weekends. So I’m going to start making our own. Rather than regular bread, though, I’m going to try sourdough bread, which requires a bit of time and patience.

To start with, you have to grow the starter culture that will make it rise.

Everyone’s starter will be unique, as it is affected by the air in your house, the chemicals in your water supply and what kind of flour you use. Once you have got it going, though, it is a living organism that you need to look after and feed and, if you do, you could keep it alive for months, years or, if you were to live long enough, centuries, as it keeps renewing itself.

Today is stage one, then. I’ve mixed a cup of plain flour with a cup of warm water in an old sweetener jar, mixed them well and am leaving them to stand. Tomorrow I’ll remove half of the mixture and replace it with more flour and water to feed the naturally-occurring yeasts that will be starting to form.

This will go on for a week or so until, if it all works, about this time next week it’ll be time to start baking our first loaf.

Check back to see how we get on.

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That was a lot easier than expected. Yoghurt cheese, which is like a very soft cream cheese is one part yoghurt and one part patience. The result is a lovely smooth, creamy cheese that’s great for spreading on crackers and, apparently, making into a cheesecake.

After hanging our homemade yoghurt in a muslin jelly strainer overnight, we headed into the outhouse this morning to find that it had separated very well into whey, which had drained off into a jug below the bag and is ideal for making bread…

Whey, collected in a jug

…and the all-important curd, which is effectively our cheese, sitting at the bottom of the bag…

Curds in a muslin jelly bag

Turning it out, we had about a tennis ball-sized piece of soft cheese, which must have taken around three quarters of a pint’s-worth of yoghurt to make. That’s not bad going when you consider that a proper hard cheese would take around a gallon of milk to make a pound.

After slicing it in two, we mixed one half with a little salt and left the other half as it was. Both were nice – very creamy and smooth – but the salted half just had the edge. It’s in the fridge now, but when this batch has gone, we’ll definitely make some more, and perhaps flavour the next batch with pepper, onion or chives.

Yoghurt cheese

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Chilli (chili to American readers) is a great winter feast. It’s easy to make, can be tailored to your own requirements, depending on how hot you like it (or don’t like it, as the case may be) and is a proper comfort food. It’s also very easy to make a vegetarian version, which we’ll do here.

Although we grow our own chillies, you don’t need to, and indeed we don’t actually use our home-grown chillies in this dish. Instead we resort to chilli powder, which we buy loose from the market as it’s cheaper than jars from the supermarket.

Ingredients for two people
300g vegetarian mince
1 small onion
1 green pepper
Large can of chopped tomatoes
Small can of kidney beans
A little oil for frying
Quarter of a teaspoon of chilli powder
(Optional) desert spoon of tomato puree

Method
Your starting point will depend on whether you are using a regular vegetarian mince substitute, such as Quorn, or a dried soya product. We favour the soya alternative. This needs to be reconstituted prior to use. Check the instructions on your particular soya product, but in our case we weigh our 100g of dried soya mince and, leaving the bowl on the scales, add a further 200g of boiling water for a total weight of 300g. Stir well and leave to soak until the mince has puffed up and the water has all been absorbed.

Meanwhile, heat a little oil in a frying pan and dice your onion and pepper. Fry off the onion, but don’t let it burn and, when it’s starting to go a little transparent at the edges, add the pepper. Fry for another three minutes, then add your reconstituted soya mince (or Quorn mince), can of tomatoes and can of kidney beans.

Mix well.

You now need to add the chilli powder, and this is where you have to be careful. First and foremost, don’t get the chilli powder in your eyes, and wash your hands well after handling. Add whatever quantity you are happy with, remembering that a little goes a very long way. In our recipe we use a quarter of a teaspoon because we also buy our kidney beaks in a chilli sauce.

Sprinkle the chilli well so that it is not all in one place and then mix again to distribute it evenly.

If you have a lid for your frying pan, seat it on the pan and then allow to cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. If it starts to look dry because your tomatoes are cooking away, add a little vegetable stock.

A good money-saving tip is to use value chopped tomatoes, large cans of which can be bought for a few pence. These are good in that they often have a high quantity of juice in comparison to the amount of solid tomato, so produce a nice moist chilli, but can lack a strong tomato flavour. If this is the case, add a generous helping of tomato puree at the same time as the canned tomatoes and mix through.

Once your chilli is properly cooked, serve with freshly boiled rice or flat bread.

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This is always a safe standby if you’ve got friends coming around at short notice (or, as proved the case this Christmas, you’re short on time). It’s cheap, easy to make and tasty. It’s also easily adapted for vegetarians by swapping out the pork sausage meat for vegetarian sausages, which can be sliced before being laid onto the pastry for cooking.

This meal freezes well. Ensure it is fully defrosted before re-heating.

Method
Dice the onions and fry them in a little oil. Be careful not to let them burn: just cook them through until they start to go a little transparent. When cooked, dry them off on kitchen paper and put them to one side.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (390 degrees Fahrenheit) and allow to get up to temperature. Meanwhile, unroll one sheet of puff pastry and lay on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. If you don’t have greaseproof paper, you can grease the tray and put the pastry directly onto it, although this is less healthy and more likely to stick, leaving you with more washing up.

Scatter the fried onions on the pastry and then roll out the sausage meat to cover them. Ensure you leave a margin of at least 2cm (three quarters of an inch) around all sides, and then lightly brush the exposed pastry edges with milk. They shouldn’t be wet – just damp. Lay your second sheet of pastry over the sausage meat and crimp it onto the milked edges of the bottom sheet.

Cut three long slits in the lid of the plait to allow air to escape during cooking, and brush with beaten egg so that it browns in the oven.

When your oven is up to temperature, cook for 30 minutes, or until the sausage meat is thoroughly cooked, by following the instructions on the meat packaging.

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