Gooseberry fool

On Sunday my Father and I went out to Hopcotts market to pick up an organic chicken and see what was in season.  Much to my delight they had gooseberries.

gooseberries

This is a taste of my childhood, gooseberries were only in season for a short time and my Mother would make gooseberry fool a couple of times each season, it truly was my favourite dessert growing up as I really did not like chocolate that much (that has changed with age I fear) and have never liked really sweet things, and gooseberries like rhubarb is naturally quite tart. In fact you can make rhubarb fool exactly the same way.

I have cheated a little, basically fools are just stewed fruit mixed half and half with whipped cream, but frankly the cream in Canada really does not hold a candle to the cream in England so I decided to use Liberty full fat Mediterranean plain yogurt.

To stew gooseberries you have to top and tail them, take off the hard bits on each end with a small sharp knife.

Gooseberries that have been topped and tailed

Place in a sauce pan with enough water to not quite cover them and add some honey or sugar to taste for this many gooseberries I added about 1/4 of honey.

ready to stew

Cook them on a medium heat for about 15 minutes until the gooseberries have collapsed, then drain most of the liquid off.

I could probably have used a little less water so as not to lose too much of the flavour that was in the liquid I boiled it down until it was a syrup and added it back to the gooseberries.

Then you have to let the stewed fruit cool right down especially if you are using cream, then it is really better to refrigerate it.  I then added equal quantities of the thick Greek style yogurt.

Mix thoroughly and refrigerate.  It really could not get any easier than that. I could not figure out why my gooseberry fool did not look like my Mothers until I remembered that for some reason she would add green food colouring.

Any way mine was a rather delicate pink colour and though I had used yogurt instead of cream it still tasted very good, and I think my Father enjoyed it too.  A little taste of English summer.