The days are getting shorter, the sun still shines most of the time but not with the intensity of summer. The air smells different, fresher, more invigorating. It’s time to finish off doing things you meant to do in summer and plan for the next few months.
Time to enjoy autumn fruits like prickly pears…
Big Man and I haven’t had the great summer we had hoped for in Spain this year. That’s the way life goes sometimes. You just have to accept it and move on. We hadn’t had a single chance to go to the beach, so at the end of last week we made it happen. Granted, we didn’t get down there until lunch time, but luck was on our side and a beachfront table at one of our favourite Chiringuitos (beach restaurants) became available as we arrived.
Perfect, time to relax with a bottle of chilled white wine, a mix of deep fried fish and some peppers and a plate of little pieces of grilled monkfish.
After a reviving coffee it was time for a gentle snooze down by the sea, listening to the waves and the distant sounds of murmered conversations.
What a difference a day makes, the next day Up the Mountain was grey and misty with low clouds lurking around the house.
A day that made me wish the blackberries here were still going strong, as they had been in England. A little bag of about 2 cups of blackberries had been picked on a seaside walk in England Down by the Sea and turned into a delicious autumn pudding.
Apple and Blackberry Pudding
- 2 cups of blackberries (approx.) washed, two small apples peeled and thinly sliced and both fruits mixed together and sprinkled with about 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
- 1 cup of self raising flour, a pinch of salt and quarter of a cup of sugar mixed together in one bowl
- 1 large egg, a teaspoon of vanilla essence, a quarter of a cup of oil and a quarter of a cup of natural yogurt beaten together until well mixed.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well, if the mixture is very stiff, add a tablespoon full of milk.
Mix the cake mix into the fruit and pour into an ovenproof dish. Bake at 180º for about 30 minutes or until a skewer poked into the centre of the pudding comes out clean and the top is slightly browned.
Serve with cream and/or ice cream whilst making sure your dog does not sneak up on you and pinch a mouthful.
Chica Andaluza 
That fish looks so crispy, crunchy and perfectly fried, I can taste it!
Hi Tanya, food looks wonderfull, day by the sea looks good too. Have just showed your blog to Danny’s sister who is here for a week. She is well impressed.xxx
Ah, glad Danny’s sister liked it! We soooo needed those few hours at the beach, really helped 🙂
The people of Malaga are particularly proud of their fried fish – it’s often called a Fritura Malaguena (“Malaga Fry Up!)
We call that fruit figs instead of pears, I have never tried them though. 🙂
Yes, in Italy too they are called Indian Figs!
Glad you had your day at the beach. The sea is a marvelous soother of stressed souls. I’m going to give your all in one pudding a go too, it looks divine 😀
Yes, a day at the sea always leaves me feeling refreshed and relaxed. Not sure of it’s the wine or the sound of the waves!
Oh, my…wouldn’t THAT make a perfect breakfast this morning!
Glad you got in a bit of beach time before the season ended – it has been an odd summer, hasn’t it?
Oh yes, we had it as dessert, but with a morning cup of coffee, I’d be set up for the day. Seems like a few of us haven’t had quite the summer we’d expected…hope all is well with you and yours.
It sounds like perfect timing for a lovely day at the beach. I like you combination of fruit…the pudding sounds terrific.
The beach day was so needed and so very much enjoyed. I’m not much of a pudding person, but this was perfect…not too sweet and such lovely flavours!
That pudding looks marvellous. The wild blackberries are flowering, and now I know what to do with them!
I love autumn fruits and going “brambling” (although it has it’s dangers!) is fun and rewarding 🙂
I have scars from the wild blackberries that grow around us! Well protected treasures…
They know how to protect themselves from us!
What a great pudding. That’s my kind of dish!
We enjoyed our little tribute to some of autumn’s loveliest fruits!
I love Spain in spring and autumn, though I’ve never had a prickly pear – I must rectify that.
I can almost taste the blackberry and apple pudding 😉
Oh you must try some (it’s impossible to eat just one!). I have a post from a year or so back which shows you how to prepare them, but I bet when you are in Barcelona they’ll have some (perhaps unpeeled but “de prickled”) in the markets!
I’ll have to look out for them in the Boqueria 😉
That all looks like bliss – especially the escapade to the beach!
It was a perfect little interlude for us!
Although there are plenty of blackberries to be picked in the Wyre Forest (or there were yesterday!) I am still a big jealous of the variety of fruit you can get on your mountain. I hope the dog enjoyed what pudding it managed to pinch!
I think autumn fruits here in Spain are my favourites – figs, prickly pears, quince, pomegranates…but I did enjoy my English blackberries and we had some amazing apples (I think they were Pink Lady) which were so good!
Yum to all of those!
Making the most of autumns little gems is what it’s all about and this looks delish. We are on the opposite side of the spectrum and aside from oranges and apples we are starting to see the “interesting stuff” trickling onto the shelves. Time for mangoes and pineapples and all of those exotics that the top end of Australia delivers to we ricketty spindle-shanked temperate climaters in the South of Aus. Love the look of this and am going to bookmark it for our own blackberry harvests. I still have a bag of them frozen from last year that Steve has bookmarked for booze…might have to pinch a few and make this gorgousness 🙂
Ooh mangoes – my very favourite fruit of ALL time! How about some blackberry vodka?!
How do you spell the noise that Homer Simpson makes when he drools??!!!! We made sloe vodka and Steve didn’t think it was “all that” (I am still learning the U.K. vernacular 😉 ) but I could see him quaffing blackberry vodka in a very short time and the resulting boozy blackberries would be lovely over homemade icecream…YUMMERS! Great idea girl…onto it when our harvest (all over the place here) gets going 🙂
Ooh, no idea about the spelling but sloe vodka sounds good – I love sloe gin! They use them a lot in Spain in anis but I hate anis 🙂 I need to find a friendly “old boy” (will lurk around the bar with Big Man) to put me on the trail of some sloes and will have to give the gin a go this year! If there are any blackberries left in the UK when we get back in October will make the vodka too – here they’re all sad and little and dry 😦
Bugger 😦 We had to go hunting for sloes in the hawthorn hedges that had been planted WAY back when Tasmania was one of the first Aussie settlements. We had heard rumours that there were sloes and indeed damsons, dotted amongst them and set off for what ended up being about 100km round trip and we found them! They damned things were perched on steep gravel inclines and it was 4 steps up and 3 sliding back but it did my sad old derierre a power of good all that climbing ;). We got lots of sloes and ended up making sloe vodka and sloe port (has it’s own name in the U.K. but too lazy to google it now 😉 ) and the port was the best. You make it after you soak the sloes in the vodka, then you toss them into the port and soak them and THEN you chocolate coat the boozy little buggers…no waste (aside from the enormous seed that is 😉 ). I think we will stick with blackberries this year. Northern Tasmania is full of them and they are all through the native bushland. There’s a tree plantation not too far away from us that has them growing right up through the branches so they obviously love it here. The negatives are trying to eradicate them from our property (and the birds keep “depositing” new plants) but the positives are that short berry season where we head off with buckets and end up with blackberry wine… YUM 🙂
I think I missed something about the cake mix in the pudding recipe, but it looks and sounds delicious all the same! And eating mixed sea treats whilst lounging at seaside is inarguably an enviable pleasure!
A day here at the seaside without a fishy lunch would be unthinkable!
I shall make a note to keep the dogs far away!
Ye, they can sneak up on you sometimes and take the food from your plate if given half a chance!
So glad you were able to get to the beach, even if only for a day. Who knows? There may be another day yet to get back there. Love the mix of apples and blackberries in your pudding, Tanya. That first photo of the bowl of pudding looks so tempting. No wonder you have to keep an eye on the dogs. How could anything, be it man or beast, resist it? 🙂
Hi John, our day at the beach was perfect and just what we needed. Hopefully we’ll manage to get down there again before the end of the month, I do hope so! Apple and blackberry desserts are very typical in England right now – fruits of the harvest!
Oh, your beach day looks amazing! And the pudding……yum yum yum! What a great summer treat!
Goddamn prickly pears… They’re called … er.. something like “figue de barbarie” here, and I bought some a while ago thinking “yay, a type of fig”… then I almost broke my teeth on those giant seeds inside!!
Love apple and blackberry together – my mother used to make blackberry and apple jam all the time when I was a kid. We used to tease her because we wanted something different… raspberry, strawberry, anything, but now actually I really miss the jam!
Yes, in Italy they’re called Indian Figs – those seeds do need a bit of navigating! Apple and blackberry jam is such an old fashioned one and I love it 🙂
How I long for the beach right now…my most favorite place in the world. And this pudding would taste great anywhere, anytime! 🙂
The beach is a very healing place to spend time – great for leaving behind the stresses and strains of life for a few hours!
I’m glad you were able to make it to the sea finally. I hope all is well. I’m not sure I’ve had prickly pear
Yes, it was worth the wait! Not sure I’ve ever seen prickly pears in the UK markets and to be honest, they’d probably be a bit sad after a few days of transit 😦
Chica, your instructions at the second bullet is missing something. A half a cup of what?? thanks.
Thanks so much for pointing it out – it should have been a quarter (not half!) a cup of sugar – thank you 🙂
It is really cold and grey here today and it has been so for a couple of days.
It rained heavily on Saturday and though I love autumn, I feel like it came too early this year
Summer has indeed gone by in a flash.
Black berries are very hard to come by here, do you think I can use plums instead?
Autumn seems to have come quickly here after a hot but short summer 😦 I think this would be gorgeous with plums as they work well with apples.
I have no idea what prickly pears taste like but I’m in for the blackberry pudd 🙂
They have pips like blackberries (just bigger) and taste a bit melony, peachy, papaya-ish (well, to me they do)!
Must remember to try them sometime 🙂
yummy ……
pudding make my saliva dripping
i just have one wordFANTASTIC