Christmas Dinner

Well I'm quite pleased with myself. Yesterday was the end to a good gardening year, we had a group of friends over for a late Christmas dinner and all the veg were homegrown. We had potatoes, butternut squash, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, carrots, swede and leeks, I felt quite smug at what we'd achieved and how good it all tasted (with some good cooking from my wife). The turkey was from a friend of my fathers so it was quite an accountable dinner.
On a less positive note my allotment is constantly under a couple of inches of water and the carrots have started to float to the surface (I wish I dug them up sooner and clamped them).
Here's to next year where I aim to be self sufficient in veg (and maybe I can talk Claire into having a couple of turkeys on the garden!

No fun for the chickens

Well without wanting to say what everyone else is saying but I'm fed up with the snow, its cost me a weeks work and my chickens are pretty much too frightened to leave the coops. At least the garden look nice!

A little bonus

I had a little bonus this week in the form of 3 brace of pheasants from the couple who I've been working for. They host the shoot dinners (a posh meal after the "guns" have been shooting all morning) and get as many pheasants as they like, these were shot Monday.

Mind you I almost didn't get any as they had been left out overnight and the next morning there was half as many (and a fat fox somewhere)!

Today I've plucked and dressed two of the birds and cut the breast and leg meat off the other four. The whole pheasants are in the oven at the moment, surrounded by vegetables dug out of a slowly defrosting allotment, should be a cheap and rich dinner!

Medlars

As I've already said, this year is the first year that our Medlar tree has had a good amount of fruit on it.

Last week I decided that the fruit was "bletted" enough (rotten) so I picked the whole crop. We decided that we have made enough jam lately to last us into next year (and then a bit) so chutney was to be made instead.

Looking on the Internet I came across Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe for a spicy chutney using the Medlars (in fact there weren't too many other recipes that I could find). His recipe called for the use of the left over pulp from making Medlar Jelly. This was going to be a long process.

• Monday night I stewed the Medlars and set them to strain overnight through a jelly bag.
• Tuesday night I made the jelly with the juice (only a tiny jar full - it better taste good!)
• Wednesday night I made the spicy chutney using the pulp from the jelly (the house still smells) but by 11.15 it still wasn't thick enough!
• Thursday night I put the chutney back on the stove, thickened it and put it into jars.

A long process so I hope it tastes good once it matures. Out of the pan it nearly took my head off with its spiciness! I've a feeling it might be more like a cook-in-sauce!

Drying Chilli Peppers - Fail

Well our lovely string of chilli peppers turned from a dark green to red and then to mouldy. Never mind, I will have to try something different next year!

Chicken Run

Well our 10 (not so) little chicks and mum have gotten a little bit too big for the arc that they were hatched in, so last weekend I fenced off a large area of the garden and wired up half of the old shed for a coop.

We moved them in on Friday night, after clipping their wings , and they love it! Running round scratching in the leaves and grass while the mother hen clucks away. Trouble is it looks good now but by the end of the week I'm sure it will be like a mud bath! Never mind, its a more natural way for them to live and they should be big enough to eat by January so we should have grass back in the spring, unless we hatched another batch...

The sad thing is, at six weeks if these were Ross Cobs then they would be killing weight now and end up as the cheap chicken in the supermarkets! Mine have got another couple of months yet, to grow at the speed that nature intended them to. It's ridiculous that they still allow chickens to be reared so fat and so fast.

Drying Chilli Peppers

It's the time of year again to dry the chili peppers that we haven't used.

This year I've decided not drag out the food dryer and instead I've just strung them from the ceiling in the kitchen. Hopefully they won't go moldy and since I strung them up on Monday night the rest of them have started to turn slowly red.

Apples!

I love apples, I eat two everyday of my life.
I know this goes against my seasonal eating but I have a packed lunch and I need my fruit. I eat English apples for as long as possible and then grudgingly make the switch. But I love this time as year as I get the crisp lovely apples for free, just a few hours spent picking them, which is a treat in itself!
My parents farm isn't great for eating apples, although I have planted many different trees over the last 5 or 6 years they are only just becoming useful, so our store mainly contains cooking apples.
The three on the picture above are my three favourites, Warner King, Scot Bridget and the good old Bramleys Seedling.
The Warner King doesn't keep over a month but is very early to be ready and I think tastes better cooked than any other apple.
The Scot Bridget is duel purpose (although its skin is quite tough), we've managed to keep them till May and it always has a huge crop no matter on the year.
The Bramleys Seedling comes from three trees down the bottom of the old orchard we've got loads of them and they store quite well, also good for a baked apple.

My mother and I have both wrapped up our apples in their paper jackets for storage, so now its just a case of thinking of enough recipes to cook them in.