A Ramble and a Crumble

We all went off for a stroll in our local park at the weekend. It was a glorious autumn day, so we wanted to get out into the sunshine, and enjoy being surrounded by nature. Boo had her trusty backpack, ready to fill to the brim with treasures that she found along the way. And as the husband was with us, she was able to spend a fair bit of the trip going ‘off-road’ to places that Little Man’s pushchair wouldn’t normally allow. She definitely made the most of that opportunity! We ambled through trees and around lakes, up hills, down pathways and across fields. Hopefully these photos will give you a sense of our walk..

We collected acorns, leaves, conkers, and most importantly, blackberries. I’d been reading lots of blog posts recently full of foraging adventures, and Boo had expressed an interest in doing this, too. We just hadn’t encountered any thus far, but all of this changed! The park is huge, and we were fortunate enough to stumble across bushes after bushes after bushes. At one stage, they actually went as far as the eye could see! Suffice it to say that we foraged! And we even got a couple of spiders in with our horde!

Boo decided that she needed to paint her day when we got back, so we got her all set up, and played mixing up some different colours and finding out what happened when we did that. She went for a big tree in the middle, and made sure she included the sunshine 🙂

After that, well, we decided we had to make apple and blackberry crumble. I was pleased with the thriftiness of the pudding from our foraged blackberries, made even better by the fact that the apples were from my mum’s garden – free fruit all round!

Here’s how we made it..

Ingredients

3 apples

1 cup of blackberries

1tbs of sugar

6oz plain flour

30z margarine

20z sugar

1tbs of porridge oats

1tbs of cinnamon

Peel, core and slice/dice the apples. Pop them into a saucepan and cover with water and add the tablespoon of sugar. Simmer for around 10 minutes until soft. Meanwhile, rinse your blackberries, grease your crumble pot and get cracking on the crumble.

Into a bowl, add the flour, margarine, cinnamon, oats and sugar. Work it all together with your fingers, ‘crumbling’ it through them as you go. Should be all done after a few minutes. Go and check your apples and drain them if ready. Put the apples mixed with blackberries in the bottom of your pot. Sprinkle over the crumble mix.

Put it in the oven on 190c for 20 minutes. Then check that the crumble looks crispy. If so, you’re all set! I like to add a little custard at this point, too 😉

And there’s a perfect autumn day. A ramble in the woods and a crumble to top it off.

Have you been getting out and about? Crumbling?!

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