Occasional Cooks: pear, bay leaf and toasted fennel crumble

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Share your cooking this week, ask for tips or recipes for a dish, tell us about your meals out.

Via goodfood.com.au

For the third week in a row, this column will be going up against big news events - it's definitely starting to feel cursed!

And yet again, I have done no cooking, or baking, recently. So I have dug into my recipe bookmarks for this delicious crumble that I made a while back.

Pear, bay leaf, toasted fennel and also white chocolate - this sounds like one of those affected-foodie-take something that works and add something weird to make it hip-concoctions. But it is really good! The herbs add a very subtle flavour that makes this a fresh take on a beloved staple.

Next time I make this, I would skip the white chocolate - to me, it only added a bit of sweetness, but no identifiable flavour (and I'm someone who likes white chocolate). 

Crumble is a wonderful dish to have in your repertoire - endlessly variable, and you can whip one up from pantry basics and a can of fruit, or fancy it up. 

Growing up, we had a very productive plum tree, and mum used to bottle plums every year, so plum crumble was the standard, not apple. The juice would bubble up through the crumble in gooey purple patches, that's when you knew it was done.

Another fancy version I've done before is pear, raspberry and dark chocolate - really, really tasty.

What do you like in your crumble?