marmalade

Now I love preserving, I make jams and chutneys all the time, but I've never made marmalade. The main reason for this is because it tastes like the most bitter orange minced up into a paste with chewy bits in. But my wife likes it and she was given a large bag of Seville oranges at work so I thought it was best to try my hand at making some - at worst it would make the house smell nicer than boiling vinegar for a chutney! I found a recipe on the Internet and loosely followed it (as usual). This involved poaching the oranges for a couple of hours, then cutting them in half and scooping out the insides and pith into a separate saucepan. This pith, flesh and seeds then gets simmered for a while before getting poured into muslin cloth and suspended (precariously) over the rest of the liquid.

The peal is then cut into thin strips and added to this liquid as well. As I had about 4 lbs of oranges I added about 6lbs of sugar and after squeezing the last bits of juice from the cloth into the pan I boiled it rapidly until setting point was reached. This took f-o-r-e-v-e-r, I must buy some petin when I see it!

In the end I made 12 jars of marmalade and Claire said it was lovely (I think it smells nice and keep trying it, but every time it taste terrible and leaves a bitter taste at the back of my throat - I don't think I'll ever be a fan!). Bad photo at the end sorry!

Pickled Cauliflower

I think Cauliflowers are like buses - they all come at once. Last weekend we had three very fine looking specimens waiting to be harvested. Rather than let the slugs eat them we decided to pick the lot.

I was already on a preserving rampage with jam and chutney under my belt (not literally that would be messy) so I decided it was best to cook the one for lunch and to pickle the remaining two. It is a know fact around our house that my wife is rather keen on pickled veg and will eat a whole jar in one sitting if allowed! I'm not so keen and struggle to eat a few pieces with a bag of crisps!

To pickle them I consulted a large number of my preserving books and then did my own thing (heavily influenced by said books).

• First wash and cut the cauliflower in bit sized pieces
• Then leave it in a brine to draw the moisture out for 24 hours(the brine was 100g of salt to 1 litre of water)
• Sterilise the kilner jar and fill with the vegetable
• Pour over the vinegar making sure it is all covered

• Seal and leave for a few weeks before eating

I'm even considering hiding this from my wife as she might eat the lot when I'm not in and make herself ill!

Red Tomato and Chilli Chutney (and Sloe jam)

I've been preserving things again this weekend. I started off with a wild Friday night making chutney (I know how to live!), although I might have dozed off and burnt the pan a little (a lot). I pretty much used the green tomato recipe but used ripe tomatoes, one big Cayenne pepper, a teaspoon of coriander seeds and a table spoon of fennel seeds. It only made three jars (so I wont be giving any away) but it smelt nice - I've just got to wait for two months to let it mature before I can try it.I spent Saturday shooting, well I say shooting but I mean carrying my gun around, as I shot nothing, very disappointing. I did pick lots of apples and over 2kg of sloes (I've never seen so many) so my trip wasn't completely pointless.

On Sunday night I made some of these sloes in jam (there is only so much gin you can drink). Sloe and apple jam is something I've not tried before and reading a recipe on the Internet it says to use

1 kg of apples,

500g of sloes,

1.5 kg of sugar

by the time I stewed the fruit and pushed it slowly through a sieve I had a lot less mixture so I only added the same weight of sugar. The resulting jam I'm unconvinced about, its sweet but has the same dry taste of cranberries, I'll have to have it on something nice to judge it properly (its a great colour though).

Plum Weekend

We've had a great bank holiday weekend. To start with My wife had her best friend and her daughter over (which I took to mean two extra pairs of hands). We managed to get loads done from car booting to digging the rest of the potatoes off the allotment and picking a huge bag full of french and runner beans (as well as filling our mouths with raspberries as we worked).

In the afternoon we decided to make plum jam. On Friday I had picked a big bag of Victoria plums from the farm after I finished work and brought them home with me, the only trouble was I think the bag was too big and we ended up making 21 jars of jam! I would have preferred to have used yellow egg plums but they were over (I managed to put 6 bags in the freezer last week), the jam tasted good and had a bit of a tart taste like a plum jam should. To make it we used 5.1 KG of stoned plums and the same of sugar (this looked like a lot of sugar!).

To round the weekend off we went to Pershore Plum day, this was much bigger than I thought it would be and spread over the whole town. We brought a few bits and bobs like plum cheese and black pudding as well as having some lovely plum cider, I also brought a book on the history of Evesham orchards and learn how there is a cider making circle in the next village to ours. Might have to see if I can join...

Drying French Beans

My french beans had definatly come to an end a few weeks ago, so I just left the last few pods on the plant to die off and dry in the weather we've been having lately.

Tonight I had half an hour in the garden before it got dark so I managed to pull all the beans off the plant and empty the pods into a seed tray. These I'll leave in the shed until they're dry and then store them in a kilner jar.

I hope I can use any sort of french bean for drying! Does anyone have any information?

Damson Vodka

With the leftover damsons (the ones that couldn’t fit in the saucepan!) I’ve decided to make a vodka liqueur. I half filled a kilner jar with damsons then added 3oz of caster sugar.
Then I filled the jar to the top with a litre of vodka, sealed it, shook it and I’ll now leave it in a dark cupboard for as long as I can bare to wait (shaking it when I remember to help it mix).

Rainy Weekend

What a wet week so far! Been soaked to the skin loads of times at work but never mind!
At the weekend Claire and I tried to pick some sloes when we went for a cold walk across the fields. Unfortunately there was none about at all; they’re related to damsons and plums and it’s been a bad year for those as well. The frost must have got the blossom back in the spring.
We didn’t manage to pick more than a handful so we decided not to bother and to strain some sloe gin that’s been sat waiting for about four years instead!
We strained it using a funnel and some filter paper which took a while but the resulting liquor tastes amazing!
I don’t think it will last long, its the perfect winter warmer after being in the cold all day.

Fruit drying

Some of the early eating apples we got from my mum and dad’s don’t keep very long, so before they go rotten its time to get the fruit dryer out from the cupboard.

We brought this fruit dryer from Poland when we went on holiday there last year as it was only £30 compared to nearly £100 in this country.



To dry the apples I peal and core them before cutting them into slices and lying on the drying trays.




Then with the food dryer on I leave them for 24 hours until they’re crisp and seal them in kilner jars.




Kept in a cool dark place I’ve kept apples like this for a year and they’re great for snacking on.


As you can see in the pictures I also dried raspberries and blackberries. The raspberries are lovely and nice on cereal with milk but the blackberries went like burn currants and I wouldn’t recommend them (make sure they dont go in the compost either or you might as well plant brambles!).

My chilli peppers will be then next thing to have the drying treatment to make my own chilli flakes.

Crab Apple Jelly

Being back on Mum and Dad's farm the other day we decided to pick some crab apples from the small damson orchard, along with some other fruit.
The idea was to make loads of crab apple jelly when we got back home. I’ve made jam in the past but I’ve never made a jelly and thought it would be interesting to try.
After looking through what seemed like hundreds of cooking books we decided that it was best to adapt a recipe to what we had at hand.

Making the jelly
We first chopped the apples into quarters and chucked them into the largest saucepan we own (it only held three quarters of carrier bag full and even then it boiled over!). We added enough water to cover the fruit and then boiled it for an hour.

We then mashed the fruit up and put it into a jelly bag suspended over a pot.
We left this bag to drain through for 24 hours (we had to go to work!). We didn’t squeeze the bag as we’d read you get more jelly but its cloudy and wanted ours to be clear.

In the end we had about a pint of juice, this we put in a sauceepan and started to simmer. We then put the same amount of sugar into a bowl and warmed it in the oven before adding it slowly to the juice.
Once the sugar was dissolved we brought it to a rapid boil until it reached setting point (this didn’t take long), and we poured it into freshly sterilised jam jars out of the oven.
Then we put wax discs on top and plastic lids before licking the saucepan clean.
The jelly set rock solid, had a really nice apple taste to it and was very clear. It only made three small jars though!

What else can I do with crab apples?

I have planted some crab apple seeds to make my own root stocks to graft some dessert apple branches on but I’m still not sure how to do it.