Roasted Vegetable Salsa

There comes a point when you have to admit that autumn is coming. I’m not ready to think of winter yet, give me time for that... But when summer days start ending on a chilly note and you find yourself reaching for your stash of vests (everyone has one, right?), it’s time to adapt your food to fit. This is often helped on by supermarkets, who begin to stock basic ingredients that just don’t work as well as they did in summer months. Take tomatoes. They’re ripe and juicy in the summer, albeit for a price. By autumn, the packets that grace the shelves are full of fruit as hard as stones and just as tasteless. Luckily, salt, pepper, olive oil and a spell in a hot oven at everyone’s favourite gas mark (6, duh!) is enough to get the tastebuds excited again.

Windfall Plum Tart

Now, though there may be a photo of a beautiful plum tart here, this article is really to showcase a trade secret I learnt on the first day of my part-time Patisserie course in Leeds (more posts on that to follow!). And that trade secret is a little thing called almond cream. In my previous ignorance, I’ve called almond cream a frangipane but was pulled up pretty quick on this by my tutor Fabrice, who sighed very loudly when I described the recipe in front of us as such. Apparently, a frangipane has twenty per cent crème patissière stirred into it. This means that every recipe I’ve made in the past that’s called its filling a frangipane has been downright lying to me. The cheek! Once I’d overcome this revelation, in class we set about making the stuff. And boy is it good. Soft, sweet, moist and dense. What’s not to like?