Beef Paprikash & Blackberry, Fig & Ginger Crumble

I usually hate tomatoes, the only way I tolerate the shiny, scarlet buggers is through a long, slow cooking process so that the aspect of them I really hate - the texture - is completely obliterated. None more so than in a Beef Paprikash, where cubes of stewing beef are quickly browned and removed from a casserole dish, then onion and garlic softened slowly in the same dish, before returning all the ingredients to the dish with paprika, chopped tomatoes and beef stock, before leaving to simmer for nigh on 3 hours, adding rings of red pepper halfway through cooking.

Beef Paprikash

I dish up with rice and apply a half dozen blobs of soured cream. Tasty, but disappointingly the paprikash is still a bit too watery as can be seen by the water underneath the rice. The flavours were there, but just a bit too watery.
Since it's Sunday, a pudding is in order: Blackberry, Fig and Ginger Crumble. Her and I spent a few hours yesterday in the dappled afternoon sunlight beneath the trees by the lake in Milton Country Park, stretching into the brambles to collect hundreds of shiny blackberries, enough to fill a cake tin in anticipation of today dish. We fill a large glass dish with our washed catch before nestling in a few quarters of fig and finely chopped ginger as well as sprinkling with sugar. To the usual crumble topping we add flaked almond and slide it into the oven for half an hour until golden on top with bubbles from the blackberries, now a deep shade of red, visibly pipping through the glass. It was seriously worth the wait too. Subtly fragrant figs matching with the blackberry fruitiness with hints of ginger and almond punctuating the sweetness on the tongue - beautiful.

Blackberry, fig and ginger crumble