Category Archives: Feeding the Family

Camp Bestival Memories – Interview with Martin Fry of ABC

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We are counting down to Camp Bestival kicking off on 26 July, that’s 70 days to go. Another fab line up this year with Rizzlekicks and Stooshie but there is a legend in the line up this year, someone not to be missed, someone I am soo excited about seeing it’s silly, a hero from my childhood – it can only be ROLF HARRIS.  I was looking forward to Camp Bestival anyway but with Rolf Harris performing that’s just made my year.

I’m recording another show for BBC Oxford there and guess who is top of my list to interview, yep, Rolf Harris himself.  Last year I had the privilege of interviewing Martin Fry of ABC, one of my teenage heroes and yes I do have all their albums and I know all the words.  So when I found he was giving interviews but was only doing four of them I thought I had no chance.  It’s amazing what doors open when you’re with the BBC, even if it is local radio, I got one of the slots.

The others were ITN, Sky News and Festivents, all the interviewees were under the age of 25 and had never worshipped Martin Fry in the way an oldie like me did, they all asked the same questions….What’s it like being back together in the band again? Martin looked positively bored but charmingly answered them without getting too animated.  When it came to my turn I introduced myself and explained that I didn’t want to talk about the band or reforming but I’d like to talk about food.

For a minute I thought he was going to throw me out of the press tent, especially when he asked if I was serious, but I stuck to my guns and got the longest interview of any of the other journos from him. Martin changed totally, became animated and obviously I’d struck a chord with a favourite subject of his, food and feeding his family.  The interview is attached to click on it and see what you think.

It made my weekend and I’m really hoping I can repeat the honour with Rolf Harris, what do you think?

Martin Fry interviewed by Beverley Glock at Camp Bestival

 

 

Bellaverde Broccoli

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Beverley Glock's Chicken and Bellaverde broccoli fajitas set
This is amazing stuff, I’ve always thought the idea of eating ‘trees’ was cool but Bellaverde broccoli is even better than normal trees, they’re big trees and they’re sweet too.

I’m really proud to say that I’m one of Bellaverde’s Celebrity Mums and have one of my favourite family recipes up on their website.  My Chicken Fajitas with Homemade Tortillas and Guacamole is a firm family favourite and it’s great to encourage the children to make the tortillas themselves as they are just so much better than the ones in the packets, just make sure that an adult does the heat work.

You can substitute the chicken for beef or pork if you wish or remove the chicken and add in extra mushrooms for a vegetarian version.  The recipe is up in the recipe section of my website and you can check out the other fab recipes from the other Celebrity Mums, Nadia Sawalha and Sophie Conran too on Bellaverde’s website

Beverley Glock's Chicken and Bellaverde broccoli fajitas

Interview with Peach Trees and Bumble Bees

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The lovely Ashley Fryer interviewed me last week for Peach Trees and Bumblebees, Ashley’s fantastic recipe and foodie website blog.  It was one of those “should I give a proper grown up answer?” or “should I give a smart alec answer?”, so figured I’d do ‘honest’ answers.

Click on the link above for the interview

Chinese New Year

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This year is the year of the Dragon, a very auspicious year in the Chinese calendar.  New Year starts on 23 January and the celebrations continue for the next 15 days.  We’re celebrating tomorrow evening with a Chinese Banquet and if you’d like some ideas then check out some of my recipes here or listen again to my Feeding the Family show

Chinese Dumplings
on BBC Oxford today when my fabulous guests Kwong Lin from Noodle Nation (@noodle_nation), my children’s absolute favourite Chinese Restaurant with branches in Oxford, High Wycombe, Aylesbury and Maidenhead talked about how his family celebrates.  Also on the show was the lovely Caroline MiLi Artiss, who has a huge following on her YouTube show and is currently writing her first cook book on South East Asian food, can’t wait for that to come out.

Rum Ganache for Breakfast

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Feeding the Family aired today at 1pm so at 9am I was busily prepping rum truffle mixture with David Greenwood-Haigh’s wonderful Haitian Rum.  It’s not actually David’s rum but David, who is the chocolatier at Divine Chocolate, does a lot to raise money for Haiti and he kindly brought me back this fabulous rum.  As David was coming on my show today I thought it only polite that I’d make up his Rum Truffles so we could try them on air.

To make sure I had the right quantity of rum I had to try the mixture (well, it would be rude not to) and it took me back to skiing, days before children, when we’d stop mid morning for a hot chocolate and rum. Actually rum ganache goes really well with porridge, with porridge in one hand and the spoon to lick out the bowl of ganache in the other it went down a treat.  A little dubious about rum at 9am but the sun is past the yard arm somewhere in the world and as long as I pretend I’m there it’s OK.

David was a fabulous guest as always, and give us insight in the invention of truffles and ganache by the world’s first celebrity chef, Augustus Escoffier, if you’d like the hear the show and the wonderful story of truffle invention and where the word ‘ganache’ came from you can listen again to the show on BBC Oxford

My edible Christmas recipes are up on the site too to download, I’ll be making some more of the savoury spicy nuts for a do tomorrow night, they’re yummy.

 

 

 

 

 

Stir Up Sunday – Traditions

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The term Stir-up Sunday comes from the opening words for the day in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549.  The collect is the prayer of the day that ‘collects’ up the themes of the readings during a church service.  The original prayer used to start:

‘Stir up, we beseech thee’, - hence the term Stir Up Sunday.

‘Stir-up Sunday’  is the Sunday before Advent – the end of November – and everyone in the family takes a turn to stir the pudding with a wooden spoon from East to West (clockwise) in honor of the three Kings making their journey, with their eyes closed whilst making a secret wish.  The sprig of holly is a reminder of Jesus’ ‘Crown of Thorns’.  Holly also was supposed to bring good luck and is said to have special healing powers.

Another custom is to put silver or gold items into the pudding; each has a special significance:

-    Silver coins are supposed to bring luck to whoever finds them in their slice of pudding on Christmas Day.

-     A gold ring signifies that the finder will be married before the year is out.

-     A silver thimble or button signifies that the finder will never marry and remain a spinster or bachelor forever, or if people didn’t want to upset whoever pulled out the thimble the meaning was changed to ‘having a lucky life’.

There should be 13 ingredients in the pudding to signify Jesus and his 13 disciples; my recipe has more ingredients because I think it tastes better.

Legends surround holly go back much further into human history.  It’s one of the few evergreen trees abundant in England in the winter and as such was considered magical as remained green and bore fruit throughout the darkest, coldest season.  The Druids believed that it kept it’s leaves and shiny red berries to help keep the beautiful throughout winter when the sacred oak lost it’s leaves.

It’s Stir Up Sunday today so gather the family together and make your Christmas Puddings and Mincemeat, I have some lovely recipes on my recipes pages, so check out

Chocolate and Ginger Christmas Pudding

 

 

Classic Christmas Pudding

Cranberry and Orange Mincemeat

Traditional Mincemeat

 

 

 

 

 

Savoury Muffins in 11 minutes – Philips Airfryer

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I’ve been testing out the Philips Airfryer, this fabulous kitchen applicance produces my healthy, amazing muffins in super quick time.  My Small Boy was off on a school trip and as usual I hadn’t got my act together to sort him out a packed lunch.  He hates sandwiches so it’s always a challenge, anyway, cheese and sun-dried tomato muffins it was.  It was 7.10am, he was leaving at 7.30am – stress city.

It took 3 minutes to heat up during which time I made the muffins, I admit that most people would probably take longer to mix up the muffins but I know the recipe off by heart as I wrote it and it’s in my new book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods. By the time the Airfryer was ready the muffins were in their cases and took only 8 minutes to cook, you can only cook 4 at a time but that meant total cooking time of 24 minutes plus 3 minutes to warm up so much quicker than heating up your oven.  Small boy left the house munching on one savoury muffin as second breakfast (it’s 7.30am) with two in his lunchbox for his school trip – day saved, massive points scored on the Perfect Mum scale.

I was quoted in the Daily Mail on Saturday talking about this great piece of kit, check it out.

Thame Food Festival – Beef Stroganoff from 500 Baby and Toddler Foods

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I had a great day last Saturday ‘being’ Tom Kerridge.  Tom couldn’t make it so I was asked to take his slot and be the ‘big name’ for Saturday afternoon – no pressure.   This went some way to make up for the fact that I was due to do book signings there but my lovely book wouldn’t arrive in time – another missed opportunity.

So with less than 24 hours to shop and plan I chose two recipes from my book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods - Beef Stroganoff with fresh noodles and Drop Scones with Blueberries,  suitable from 9 and 12 months respectively.  Went down a storm, tasted fabulous too and I had my glamourous assistant up on stage, Olivia, who comes to Saturday morning cooking club was dragged out of the audience to help, she was wonderful and we got her a huge round of applause at the end.

500 Baby and Toddler Foods has it’s own facebook page so please check it out, comment on it and ‘like’ it.

Does that sound like baby food to you?  That’s how it should be, the whole idea is that the recipes are for the whole family to eat, yes you would need to puree it for little ones but they can still eat the same food so you’re not cooking different meals for the whole family. Life is too short, as a new Mum you need sleep, not stress.

 

Lemony garlic chicken

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This lemony garlic chicken is one of the easiest and cheapest dishes for supper. Work on the basis of 1 chicken thigh per child and 1-2 per adult depending how hungry you are.  If you have an AGA then blast the dish in the roasting oven for 20 minutes before transferring to the simmering oven for at least an hour or it’s fine to stay in there for 2-3 hours, you may need to add a little more wine or stock if it starts to dry out.

This is a great family staple, it’s cheap – £2.50 for 6-7 chicken thighs, 30p for a lemon and similar for the garlic, use the bottle of wine you have to drink from.  I am making an assumption that you do drink white wine, if not, use stock as it would be shame to buy a whole bottle of wine that would get wasted.  You could always send it over to our house, it certainly wouldn’t get wasted here.  Actually, just realised that’s what’s missing, it’s gone 8pm and I don’t have a glass of wine in my hand, this is so wrong.

This dish you can pop into the oven at around 2pm and it will be ready when the children get in from school, serve it with some rice or mashed potato and veg, you could always adapt it for a supper party version and serve it with a big green salad and lots of fresh crusty veg.  Serve it in the roasting dish as the juices caramelise at the bottom of the pan and cry out to be mopped up with lovely bread.

The skin becomes lovely and crispy and the garlic softens as it roasts meaning that you share out the cloves, squeeze them out of their papery skins over the mash or crusty bread, smear the roasted lemon on top, dunk into the lovely juices collected into the pan and stink of garlic for at least 24 hours.  Do you know what, it tastes fantastic so just make sure that anyone you want to kiss also eats the roast garlic.

 

 

500 Baby and Toddler Foods – amazing recommendation

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I had to blog this email, sent last night from Diana Viola who reviews cookery books in the US for the website www.inmamaskitchen.com.  I read her review of my new baby and toddler cookbook ‘500 Baby and Toddler Food

chicken curry
s’ last night and sent her an email thanking her for writing such a lovely review.  This is the email she sent back and I have her permission to blog it:

Hi Beverly,

“I don’t review books I think irrelevant, and never ones that are bad, as I don’t ever-ever-ever want to write negative reviews. I can’t live in a negative space.
I felt it important to stress the serious issues that you have addressed, as I am concerned for the health of the generations to come.  You dealt with that so beautifully
Andy Sturdevant at Sellers is just aces in helping put the material forward.  He is my friend as a publisher, and your friend as an author.  Believe me, I see them all,  and I mean it – he’s aces.
I thank you for the great care you put in your work.  We all know it is a very dicey food world these days, and you will help many people.  I hope you sell droves of books.
Diana”
I was so touched by that email from someone who knows what they’re talking about, Diana reviews an awful lot of books and that means the world to me.