Homemade food

An apology…

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Sometimes I have to admit I was wrong about something. Naturally, that hardly ever happens. But when it does, I’m quite prepared to apologise & set the record straight. So here goes: I was wrong about food mixer/processors.

For quite some time now I have maintained that they are a giant waste of space & money. The last one I had, a big Magimix, I freecycled a few years ago and haven’t missed at all. As we no longer have a dishwasher (and in fact the components couldn’t be put in a dishwasher anyway) I felt it just transferred the work from one side of the meal to the other; instead of spending half an hour chopping, slicing & mixing before the meal, we spent half an hour trying to wash dried-on food scraps out of the more inaccessible corners of the thing after the meal. Also I couldn’t “feel” the food; my hands give me the best indication of when a dough, pastry or a crumble is ready. You can actually feel the texture change as the ingredients meld into something new. The Magimix speeded all the boring stuff up, but made it impossible to catch that magic moment when it’s ready but not overprocessed.

But last weekend a friend who brought up a big family then went on to run a Bed & Breakfast establishment asked whether I’d like her old Kenwood Chef. “It’s not even in a fit state to Freecycle, but it’d be such a shame just to take it to the Tip,” she warned me. Remembering other good cooks I’ve known who have sworn by these sturdy old workhorses, and that my older daughter & her friend make cupcakes to die for & that would undoubtedly sell like – well, hot cakes – if they ever made enough of them, I said we’d be delighted to try it out. So her husband brought it round at the start of the week. It cleaned up very nicely, but I was too busy to play with it until yesterday. And now, all I can say is a huge thank you to Ruth & Richard; truly a magnificent gift!

Two large loaves of bread, a batch of meringues, a raspberry clafoutis and some scrumptious peanut butter cookies later, I can vouch for the fact that this thing does actually save a lot of time & effort, and does the job really well. It’s a whole lot slower than the Magimix, and that’s an attribute I appreciate now; I have time to judge when things are ready. I think it’s also more thorough, and much easier to wash up. There’s enough capacity to cook-and-freeze, even in a large household situation. If I ever wanted to, there are all sorts of attachments & accoutrements I could buy to add on to it, but I’ll stick to the basic functions for now & see what time & trial & error bring up.

The main drawback that I can see is that it’s really heavy, being mostly metal; luckily I have some workspace free in my new-look utility room that it can live & be used on, because if it had to go back in a cupboard after use, it wouldn’t come out again in a hurry! But although by & large I am getting rid of kitchenware & gadgets that don’t earn the space they take up, I think this one will well & truly justify sacrificing a bit of clear space for.

So there you go! I was absolutely wrong to insist that gadgets hardly ever make life any easier. The right gadget, in the right situation, can indeed make a difference. So for anyone who has a large & hungry  household to cater for, and enough space to house one, I can heartily recommend the Kenwood Chef, even if I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend actually going out & buying one!

Ooooh – nice!

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Bit of luck yesterday – I went down to the Tip with loads of cardboard, polystyrene (aaaargh – horrible stuff!) and wrapping from the utility room revamp. “We’ve got something for you!” Lee greeted me. “Some alpaca, in fact.”
Curious, I trotted over to the covered skip, thinking most likely I’d find a bit of raw fleece from an older animal that someone had meant to use for toy stuffing, perhaps. But no – two big bags of absolutely gorgeous-quality, squishy-soft, white, crimpy, supremely spinnable fluff, labelled “weanling”… the sort of stuff I’d have to hand over at least £30-£40 a bag for, if I were inclined to actually buy any. I love spinning (and wearing) alpaca, but don’t usually feel I can justify spending that much on my hobby – maybe £4 for a little bag once in a while. I spun up a quick sample skein last night and enjoyed it hugely; it almost spins itself. There was also a bag of washed Jacob’s fleece, which I shall give to my neighbour, as I already have 4 bags of it. I have to ask  – who throws these things away? There’s no sign of moths or  mice or anything else that would make me reject it. It may have belonged to someone who isn’t spinning or felting any more, for whatever reason, but how come they couldn’t find anyone to give it to, rather than just dumping it? Not that it matters; luckily the gents were alert & it’s made its way into my stash now. Into the very top, the next-project bit of it, as it happens.

What a lovely find! I’m a very happy bunny. Thanks, gents…

And I’m hardly even going to mention the pheasant – poor little fellow threw himself in front of a car (not ours, I hasten to add) on a country road at the weekend whilst we were helping with the move. We drove one way; the road was clear. We offloaded & drove back again 10 minutes later; there he was, dead as a dodo. He was on a bend & anything much shorter than a human would have been hugely at risk of being squished themselves, trying to drag him away – so who could resist? A large pot of delicious stock & several tasty salads later, I’m very grateful to him…

Well, I feel quite let down…

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…by Google!

I do enjoy a bit of foraging, and the WWW has been my constant companion & advisor, both in identifying plants and in working out how (not to mention whether) to use them. I love walking in our beautiful countryside or along the riverbank, seeing what I can find to supplement & broaden our diet, and cooking & preserving the assorted goodies that Nature gives us. But not all my foraging takes place in the wild; our local market is often an excellent hunting ground for astonishing bargains, like the £1 sack of organic parsnips I bore home triumphantly a few weeks back. I shared that with a couple of neighbouring households, and Googled parsnip recipes (NOT Woolton pie) and we’ve had some lovely cream of parsnip soup, rösti, and roasted mixed vegetables over the last few weeks.

On Friday I found one of the fruit & veg stalls selling entire boxes of blueberries for £1; that’s 12 of the little supermarket punnets, which sell for about £1.75 each. Admittedly they were not in the first flush of freshness & one or two were suspiciously stuck together; I knew there’d be some sorting out to do. But I also knew that if they were too far gone to use any of them, I could use them for dyeing some of the tonnes of fleece & wool that’s hanging around the place. In the event, when I sorted them out this afternoon, less than one punnet’s worth had to be thrown into the compost & the rest were fine, so, having just been given some nice clean jam jars, I decided to make some blueberry & lemon jam.

The sort of thing I need Google for is to find out whether any given berry or fruit will gel left to itself, i.e. how much pectin it contains. I do have plenty of old recipe books, but were blueberries available to Isabella Beeton? It might take me hours to find out; it’s far quicker to use the computer. But could I find a definitive answer to how much pectin there is in blueberries? Not in a hurry… Some sites claimed they were high in pectin, and some that they were low in it. The rather-useful Pickle&Preserve was hedging its bets with a “medium” rating. I do have some pectin in the cupboard, but I always prefer not to use additives, however natural, if I don’t have to, so I decided to get on with it & see for myself. If it didn’t gel, I could always call it a coulis.

Well, I’m firmly on the “high” side. I would swear that the masher I used to smash the berries up as they were heating & the sugar was dissolving had trainee jam on it. And it had only been boiling for a very few minutes before the drops on the cold plate – I do own a sugar thermometer, but a cold plate is far less bother & much easier to clean – wrinkled straight away. Time will tell; it hasn’t cooled yet, but it looks like we have nearly 4½lbs of blueberry & lemon jam, for the grand sum of about £2. I feel a scone-baking session coming on…

And just an update on the mincer front; the little blue one found a new home without any trouble yesterday at Boscombe Vintage Market but in the meantime another one has landed in my kitchen. This one is a slightly rusty old “Potter” about the same size as the Spongs; it doesn’t have the slicer/grater attachment, but it does have a grain grinder and it screws onto the tabletop, rather than sticking down as the Spongs do – or rather, don’t, as our wooden tabletop isn’t smooth like the Formica surfaces they were designed for. Once I’ve cleaned the Potter up, I will have to choose which one stays & which one goes. Lovely, and effective, though the beige Spong is, it’s not that practical to use for slicing/grating in my particular kitchen, as I need three hands; one to push the food down, one to turn the crank, and one to hold the machine itself down! So that one too may end up on my stall next month.

Come to think of it, I have a whole porch full of “kitchenalia” – maybe I need two stalls…

Phew…

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…life seems to be calming down a little now. Just enough to write a post, anyway. We had a wonderful holiday (there’s so much more to Spain than many tourists ever see! Every time I go I leave a little bit more of my heart behind) but spent much more money than I’d anticipated. And now I’m beginning to realise why more people don’t start their own businesses… even running the shop for just 25 hours a week, there’s never enough time for all the things I need or want to do, either in the shop or at home. This season has been a complete write-off from the preserving point of view; I’ve had no time at all for foraging or preparing, beyond a small batch of crab apple jelly. Luckily there’s still plenty left in the freezer & on the garage shelves from last autumn, but I actually physically miss going out & gathering stuff in. I really need to sort the house out & redecorate whilst there’s less stuff in it, but there’s no time for that either. And younger daughter needs more input from me (elder girl is my right-hand woman in the shop, and is in fact a huge help in all ways – I wouldn’t be able to do it without her, and can’t thank her enough, even if she is just working off her airfare to Las Vegas!) but there’s no time for that, or re-stocking the shop… MUST do better at the things that really count; it’s thinking cap time.

So I’ve started the Christmas planning now. For many reasons, we have never gone overboard & spent a fortune on consumer goods, but this year I’m really going to rein in the festive spending. I know that for a lot of people, that isn’t a matter of choice, and I don’t mean to make light of their grief & dismay, but I see this as a joyful & interesting challenge; how can we have a happy & meaningful Christmas for the least possible cost? A while ago I read Jo Robinson’s excellent “Unplug the Christmas Machine” about how to make Christmas less stressful & genuinely enjoyable, and I’m taking many of my cues from that as well as from various Frugal-type forums I’ve belonged to & contributed to over the years. Also from the Quaker attittude that every day is a holy day; there’s simply no need to work yourself into the ground celebrating just one or two of them, especially if you end up losing sight of what makes them special in the welter of work you’ve created for yourself. For that reason, I’m not going to go all out for a handmade Christmas either, lovely though that is; I’m going to concentrate my efforts on the things that really matter.

I have a collection of in-date Tesco vouchers saved up that will cover festive booze and any of the “special”  food items I can’t buy locally; Twiglets particularly spring to mind! Otherwise our local market & shops can supply everything we need – superb quality at reasonable cost. Prezzies for the offspring will be modest again this year (especially as I gather they’re hoping to go back out to Spain next year) and amongst the wider family I have suggested a second-hand or home-made Christmas; with more than 30 of us that’s only sensible, and we’ve had a strict “upper spending limit” for many years now. Decorations will be home-made (or possibly CraftsPlace-made) or natural and the tree may even be home-grown, as a Lawson’s Cypress in our little front garden is in need of a severe haircut. We never decorate until just before the Big Day anyway; IMHO the whole idea goes stale after a couple of weeks & if you start Christmas at the beginning of December you’ll have had enough of it all by about the 20th!

So now I need to find the time to hunt around for those little special items that will bring a genuine smile to people’s faces. And for patterns, supplies & ideas to keep my customers happy in the shop, too. In other words, what I need most is just – more time…

A good haul today…

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I just nipped into the Tip in passing today, to see whether they by any chance had any last-minute Japonica quinces; I think I’ve denuded the entire neighbourhood of them now. No quinces, but there were a fair few other bargains to be had:- 

  • a wicker basket for my stall. Stuff looks far better, and is easier to transport & display, in  containers, and wicker looks the part nicely on top of my rescued red velvet ex-curtains.
  • a bag full of splendid pelargoniums to brighten my conservatory windowsills over the winter & give plenty of cuttings for next summer’s windowboxes.
  • another armful of tins; I do have enough now, but a friend is collecting up good quality kitchware to do a market stall of her own. These are very attractive, worthy of display in their own right.
  • a sturdy solid wood chopping board.
  • two intact “Bodum” cafetieres, small & mid-sized.
  • some good-quality utensils for my friend’s stall – an easy-clean garlic press, a sturdy stainless steel corkscrew, and a tin-opener that’s so good I may not hand it over! And some smooth, sturdy old wooden spoons, and a couple of rather nice pastry tins.
  • more jamjars. I know there are more quinces out there somewhere…

The reason I’ve been hogging all the quinces & jamjars is that Transition Town Wimborne are doing a stall at the Charities Fair at the Allendale Centre this Saturday. My contribution will be a “preserves” tombola & taste-testing – hopefully that’ll be an eye-catcher, raise us some funds and raise people’s awareness of just how much free food is going to waste in the hedgerows & gardens all around us… as well as lightening the load on our garage shelves!

How long can a girl resist…

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… trees full of ripe fresh free fruit? I know I still have plenty of fruit in my own garden to pick & preserve, but still…

In the middle of our little town there’s a peaceful little garden, open to the public, opposite the Library and running down to the bank of the millstream. It was once a kitchen garden and still has two big fruiting trees, an apple and a pear, hanging over the street, as well as a bay tree, herbs and various other edible plants, all well overgrown now. It belongs to Salamanders, the “Good Cook’s Shop” but none of our local good cooks seemed to have thought to actually use this fruit, which has been falling for a while and generally messing up the pavements underneath.

So today a friend and I took our two applepickers and a shopping trolley and went and asked permission to pick some of the fruit. This was duly given, and we spent an hour or so of total frustration waving our pickers madly at the gigantic pears hanging mostly just out of reach. Most of which are still there, but we did get a trolley-load of lovely free fruit, some of which is bubbling gently away on my cooker even as I type, gently sweetened & spiced. But we also got some very funny & suspicious looks! One lady commented sadly that we should leave it all for the squirrels; all I can say is that there probably aren’t that many squirrels in the whole of Dorset, that they could eat it all before it goes off! And as for the gang of kids who were falling over laughing at our antics – who gets the last laugh? The people who think it’s funny to expend any effort to get good food when you could just go & buy it, or the people who can think of better uses for their money?

But there were some delightful moments too; the Polish gentleman with his pretty little daughter who couldn’t resist having a go with the picker, and simply beamed when we handed him the giant pear he’d snared. The many people who stopped & said, “Well, thank heavens they’re not all going to go to waste!” The children who were so thrilled to be given a juicy pear fresh from the tree, and the people who were impressed with our assorted plans for our foraged goodies. Not to mention those who told of us of other fruit that’s just going to waste or even becoming a nuisance, dropping onto pavements and being left to rot.

Next year, we’ll get in earlier. And be more organised – and have even more jamjars and preserving jars ready for our scrumped & scrumptious harvest!

Quince marmelade…

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…why didn’t anyone tell me….? *** Wow…! ***

My 2 young Cydonia quince trees are giving a bigger crop each year, and I was given 2lb of Japonica (Chaenomeles) quinces too. I kind of knew that the original marmelade was made with quinces, so I consulted some of my venerable rescued recipe books, had a go, and now I’m wondering why on Earth I spend so much on Seville oranges every year! I mixed recipes a bit, but have ended up with something I want to repeat, which is just as well, because I knocked on a neighbour’s door this afternoon & came away with another 4lb of Japonicas…

Basically I cut the 2lb of Japonicas in half & stewed them gently in 3 pints of water until they were very soft, then mashed them a bit. I poured the resulting brew into a muslin cloth over a sieve on a saucepan and waited until the dripping had subsided. As I wasn’t going for a clear jelly, I also gave it a gentle squeeze.  Then I added a shake of cinnamon, the juice & zest of 2 lemons and 3 lbs of sugar, heated gently & stirred occasionally whilst the sugar dissolved. In the meantime I grated 1lb of the Cydonia quinces, co-incidentally using up all the slightly-damaged ones that wouldn’t keep. (If you’re after jelly, or just don’t have any tree quinces, you can skip this step and just use the same weight of sugar that you have of quinces.) I added the gratings to the syrup and let it simmer gently until the grated quinces became translucent. Then up went the heat until it reached a rolling boil, into the oven went the clean wet recycled  jars & lids to scald, and about 20 minutes later it reached setting point. I waited a bit until it had started to congeal, then stirred well to redistribute the quince shreds, then into the hot jars it went.

When I poured it into the jars I couldn’t believe what a beautiful red-gold colour it had gone; both kinds of quince have yellow skin, with flesh best described as dark cream. There was only a tiny shake of cinnamon, and I used plain ordinary cheap white sugar; where did that glorious colour come from? It’s clear  like marmelade, and tastes even better; tangy, clear, sharp & sweet at the same time, a real wake-me-up taste. Can’t wait for breakfast time tomorrow!

Has there ever been such a year…

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Hedgerow Jelly in the making...

… in the hedgerows? I am foraging, gathering, drying, preserving as fast as I can, and most of it is still going to waste – I only have one pair of hands and 24 hours in a day – not fair!

Blenheim Oranges ripening on our old tree...

Our Blenheim Orange is groaning with fruit – again – and we’ve been picking anything up to 9 figs a day from our Brown Turkey. I responded to a Freecycle offer of crab apples and now have 40+ jars of Crab Apple Jelly and Hedgerow Jelly in my storecupboard; there are 4 demijohns of apple wine burping happily in the downstairs bathroom, 15 large jars of chutney cooling in the garage and there’ll soon be cider, too. On a walk down by the river with my elder daughter this evening I grabbed an armful of hop vine from a tree beside the path, and in conjunction with those easily reached on the side & roof of our garage, there are now 4 trays of ripe hop pannicles drying in my dehydrator.  The hedegerows down by the riverbank are literally blue with sloes where they aren’t black with blackberries & elder, and there’s a bowl of hazelnuts on the kitchen table that I just picked up from the pavement at the top of our road, never mind the ones we grow in the front garden; saves paying £2.79 for 454g in the supermarket!

The hardware to do all this – jamjars, Kilners, demijohns, etc. – came partly from our local Freegle & Freecycle groups, partly from Transition Town Wimborne’s appeal for unused brewing & preserving equipment, which I’m storing, and partly from my sister-in-law’s capacious store room, where she’d been hoarding jamjars in the hope that one day she’d have a spare half hour free to actually make some jam! There’s plenty of equipment left to give away, too; the point of the TTW appeal was to enable other people to start up, and several have already benefitted, but there’s more where that came from, as well as the bits I’m using too!

I have never seen so much fruit out there for the taking; I know it’s probably just a result of several damp, cool years followed by a cold, pest-killing winter & a reasonably dry warm summer, but part of me really feels we shouldn’t be wasting any of this. Yes, we should always leave plenty for others (and there are others out there this year, at long last) and plenty for the birds and other wildlife, but who knows when we’ll see such bounty again?

Jars of scrumptious goodness jammed in everywhere!

Happy bunny today…

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Apple - what? Cake? Clafoutis?
Apple - what? Cake? Clafoutis?

Yesterday I caught a glimpse of something interesting on the “Community Noticeboard” at our local supermarket… “For Sale – Cider Press, cost £70 last year, will accept £20…” I fairly scuttled home and jumped on the phone. To cut a long story short, the press and the Pulpmaster to go with it were delivered to my door at 8.30 this morning, and the last of my windfalls are now history! There’s a large jug (just under 3l) of delicious brown juice in my fridge; not really enough to make cider with, but better by far than just rotting down quietly in my compost heap. And I got to thinking that there must be something productive you can do with the leftover pomace, so I tried my hand at an easy-looking American apple cake recipe. It didn’t come out very cake-like, as it’s very moist; more like a clafoutis, really, but it is utterly scrumptious & moreish… and there are two more cartons of pomace waiting in my fridge which might just get made into more apple butter, if I have time tomorrow.

I did have to ask why he was selling it, but the answer was deeply reassuring – he’s invested in a bigger one!

I’m shattered…

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… and I’ve got a horrible cold. But I’ll live, I expect. In the last few days I’ve made two gallons of homegrown plum wine & poured it off its pulp and into demijohns, which are actually rocking, so wildly enthusiastic is the fermentation. I’ve made crab apple jelly with apples from the riverbank, and turned the fruit pulp from both projects into a spicy chutney. I’ve finished two shawls, sent another load of sewing machines off, and had a massive chuckout.

We did a car boot sale at the weekend, and did rather well; I donated the leftovers to another ‘booter through Freecycle as we have quite enough stuff cluttering up our lives, but it was too good to ditch. But one of the other emails I received touched my heart, so I sorted out some more halfway decent stuff to give to him too. Then, because I was going down with this cold and therefore stuck at home, I started to sort the porch out so that I can store my e-shop stuff out there. This produced another load of halfway decent stuff as well as a car load of absolute rubbish, so the second ‘booter came back for another helping. Today I got stuck into the airing cupboard, which is a) very small and b) located in the smallest bedroom, which means that whichever of the offspring is in there also has to have everyone else traipsing in & out for sheets, pillowcases etc. So I invested in a massive linen press from IKEA , having waited several years for something suitable to turn up secondhand. Nothing else was big enough, in the end, so I capitulated and bought new. I’ve transferred all the day-to-day bedlinen into that, which is out on the landing, and put the longterm bedding – mattress protectors, spare pillows, spare duvets & guest bedding – into the airing cupboard instead. Most of that had just been cluttering up our bedroom previously.

The back of the airing cupboard produced another carload of stuff that was quite simply well past it. A few items worth Freecycling, but most just ragging, to be honest, so that’s gone off now too. And when I did the crab apple jelly, I realised that I had way too many Kilner jars too. So I Freecycled a dozen; again, I had hordes of emails. The first came from someone I know, so I said they could have them. But then came a reply from a friend, too… I thought I still had more than enough, so I said she could have some too, but when I counted them, that would have left me with just two. However, when I took some of the rubbish produced from my clear-out down to the Tip, sitting there on top of an old filing cabinet was another box of Kilner jars… so there are enough for all of us after all. But not for everyone that asked – which just goes to show that one person’s landfill is another person’s treasure.

Now I just need to keep up the momentum. Perhaps I should be ill more often!