I have been a little bit hungry today and so my mind has kept wondering to food, then eating, to thinking of cooking, what my favourite recipes are and so forth!  I must admit, I have had great fun imagining all manner of sumptuous foods!

As such, I was thinking about all of the different chefs I like and that now would be a good time to find out a little bit more about them and their style of cooking.

As I would one day love to be a domestic goddess, I thought it only fitting to pick the lovely Nigella Lawson first.

I like Nigella. I have never cooked a recipe of hers but I like her because she is appears to be very personable, welcoming and so very normal! What other chef admits that some of their food is really not that healthy and that they like to eat a bit too much on occasion. That honesty is very refreshing.

I also like her philosophy when it comes to cooking:

- Cook for pleasure
- Cook for enjoyment
- Cooking should be about fun and family.

Even Nigella has admitted that she thinks that part of her appeal is that her approach to cooking “is really relaxed and not rigid. There are no rules in my kitchen”.

I like it!

Nigella in the kitchen

It’s a miserable cold and wintery day at present, so I feel like comfort food.  Luckily for me, there is actually a comfort food section on Nigella’s website www.nigella.com Clearly I am in heaven!

It would seem a bit pointless to talk about Nigella’s cooking without actually picking something to make. While I don’t normally have a sweet tooth, strangely I do have an addiction to crumbles. I simply can’t get enough of them! So when I saw the following recipe, I knew it was the one for me!

Jumbleberry Crumble! Photographed by Lis Parsons

Jumbleberry Crumble by Nigella Lawson

Ingredients

For the Crumble Topping
- 100 g flour
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- 50 g cold butter, cut into small cubes
- 3 x 15 ml tablespoons Demerara sugar

For 1 crumble in a cup (approx 300 ml capacity)
- 100 g frozen summer fruits
- 1 teaspoon cornflour
- 2 teaspoons vanilla sugar (or regular sugar and a drop of vanilla)
- 75g frozen crumble topping

Method

1. Put the flour and baking powder into a bowl and rub in the cubes of butter, using your fingers until you have a mixture like coarse sand. (This is such a small amount, it’s not really worth getting out the heavy machinery.)

2. Stir in the sugar and then put into a freezer bag to freeze.

3. This mixture is enough to make 4 jumbleberry crumbles in the cups (or about 8 ramekins.)

4. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees. Put the summer fruits in either a cup or ramekin and sprinkle the cornflour and sugar over the top. Stir around a little.

5. Sprinkle the frozen topping over the fruit and bake the cup for 20 minutes or the ramekin for 15 minutes.

Yum!!! I could, can and will make this. This is not hard. It’s not even that time consuming. In fact, I am exceptionally excited about my impending crumble foray!