Cooking with Steph, Part One.

My flat has recently started buying food and cooking together, in fact two Sundays ago - I can tell you this so specifically as Sunday is my night to cook. Previously, I had never really cooked any main meals for my flatmates, just dessert, so my night kind of automatically became a 2 course affair. I quite like cooking, but I prefer baking or making dessert, so having to think up and create a tasty, nutritious, filling meal for a 'family' of six is tricky. I thought I would share with you my meals so far.

The first Sunday I made a roast. Not one, but two Chickens were sacrificed, along with potatoes, pumpkin, beans and some stuffing balls (the first time I have made them!). Oh, and gravy (Packet mix though. What a lazy bitch). For desert there was an Apple Crumble. This, dear readers, took me almost three hours to make, and made me realise that roasts are far from easy - I mean, you can chuck a bird in the oven, but then you have to time out the veges! I ended up taking out the potatoes and microwaving them as my clever boyfriend suggested after I neared tantrum state. Back they went in the oven so to make me look like an authentic cook. Stuffing balls were not in the chicken so that our sole Vegetarian flatmate still got to try. By sheer fluke, shoving a few quartered onions up the Chicken's orifice made for some good flavour, and lovely roasted Onion too. Another observation - you need a giant oven to cook everything at once! All the veges ended up crammed together with the stuffing balls as I tried to squeeze in the crumble...

I knew the Apple Crumble would be a winner, as it has been a staple crowd pleaser of mine ever since my older brother brought a Spanish Rugby player to our house for dinner when I was about 13. He looked at me with a hot hot European smile (my first. Blush.) and said in a mildly drool-worthy accent that it was the best he had ever tasted. I have been making it in the hopes of finding a way to such a hot man (eg. through his stomach) ever since. I never measure it out, but here is my sort-of-recipe for you.

Steph's Cack-handed Crumble
Ingredients (I usually just do this by eye, but if you really need measures, here you go):
1 Cup flour
1/2 Cup Rolled Oats, some sort of Museli, or LSA (Linseed, Sunflower & Almond seeds, all crushed up together)
1/2 Cup brown sugar (or any sugar really)
50g Butter
2 teaspoons Cinnamon or the like (or as much as you can handle in the warm spice stakes)
A handful of chopped nuts - I like slivered almonds or hazlenuts...
Apples, Pears, peaches (even tinned if need be!) - whatever fruit you have shitloads of

1. If you are really trying to impress, then first boil up the fruit with a little bit of water and some vanilla. This makes it all mushy and yum - and if you have any leftover it is good on cereal.
2. Mix up all the dry ingredients. You might want to soften the butter, then crumble it in to the dry ingredients. It should feel a bit like the consistency of potting soil
3. Spread the fruit on the bottom of some sort of oven proof dish, then the crumble mixture on top of that. Pop in the oven at 180 Celsius for around 20 minutes, or until golden.
4. Serve with Vanilla Ice cream, and/or whipped cream. Yum!

This went down a treat with the flatmates, and meant the pressure was on. I'll tell you what my sophomore dishes were soon...