jars

Freecycle Chutney…

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Well, what else can I call it? We’re not short of apples on our own big Blenheim Orange tree this year, although it’s hardly a bumper crop, but I’d gathered a handful of those pretty little red crab apples from the riverbank to make some crab apple jelly with. However there weren’t an awful lot on the tree, and I know other people like to use them too, so I didn’t feel I could be greedy & help myself to too many. There are other trees I know of, but they’re quite a walk off the road and the weather’s pretty soggy just now. And I’d found some other interesting-looking crab apple recipes online; several chutneys, crab apple butter, and slow-roasted crab apples, to name but a few, which looked well worth a try. I also seemed to be rather short of jars; the box I thought was still out in the garage, wasn’t, when I went hunting for it. So I asked on one of our local Freecycle groups, both for crab apples and for jars. And I was lucky enough to get two replies, one from Maggie whose elderly mother loves honey & goes through at least a jar a week, so had a full box of jars saved up, and one from Stan, who said he had not crabs, but apples…

Oh boy, does he have apples! I am now suffering from serious orchard envy. He and his wife moved to their cottage 20 odd years ago, on retirement, and he has been building up his orchard ever since. Sadly he’s struggling to manage his garden now, as his wife is very ill and he’s finding it hard to bend, but the place should be declared a national treasure. There are all the well-known varieties, and some lesser-known trees too, grown from cuttings, interspersed with gooseberries, currant bushes and an enormous row of runner beans. Anyway I helped myself to three huge bags of windfalls, mostly of small yellow apples with little red splashes, which taste a little like Golden Delicious, and he handed me a bag of jars too. I’ve promised him a jar of the results, and some Egremont Russets, too, as his Russet has stopped a-russetting & now bears pretty, delicious red apples that only bear a slight resemblance to an Egremont.

On the way home, I spotted some small red fruits lying on the road into town, and realised there’s a crab apple in a roadside garden there. So I pulled into the nearest car park, plucked up my courage & knocked on the door. The owners professed themselves delighted to let me pick up their windfalls too. So I came home absolutely laden with bounty…

I mixed the little yellow apples & the red crab apples with a couple of damaged quinces from our own garden, which won’t keep until I get round to making the quince marmalade; I’m willing to bet that the crabs & quince will make up for any lack of zing from the yellow ones. The slow-cooker is full to the brim of apples, cranberries, rosemary, onions & garlic turning gently into chutney, and I stuffed both my big preserving pans full to bursting with apples & boiled them up to make lots of pretty pink juice for crab apple jelly. The drippings from 4 muslin bags have now filled the 10-litre pan, and the chickens will dine well on the fruit pulp tomorrow. But I hadn’t thought about sugar… it would take every ounce we currently have, and then some, to turn that lot into jelly. So off to the supermarket I shall hurtle, tomorrow, and trust that they’ll have enough; they don’t always have the big bags.

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We won’t eat all this ourselves. Apart from the jars I’ll return to the donors, I like to make up a basket of home-made things – I hesitate to call them goodies – for various family members at Christmas. Some will get given to produce stalls in support of one organisation or another & some will be inflicted on absent offspring’s flatmates. I will go out & gather more crabs, to try the slow-roast idea, when the weather’s not quite so damp. But I still have rather a lot of apples to process/give away/eat and I haven’t even really started on our own home-grown ones yet!

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Don’t get me wrong; I am actually really grateful for all this & will do my best not to waste any of it. I’m just goggling a bit at the sheer size of the task I have before me! And it triggers some interesting thoughts about life before or without freezers & dehydrators, as the seasons turn. I may have to haul out some demijohns…

Further thoughts on hoarding…

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…albeit mostly aimed at people who would die rather than read this!

A glut of something useful or edible does not constitute a hoard. The slowly-diminishing store of marmalade, crab apple jelly & other preserves in the garage is not a hoard; it was made to use up gluts & it’s there to be eaten & enjoyed as well as given away. It has all been made within the last two years – now eat it, before I’m forced to let this year’s crops rot on the trees & bushes! The fact that it didn’t come from a supermarket or contain 70% sugar does not mean that it’s not fit for human consumption.

Helpfully throwing out things that the helper considers naff isn’t actually helpful at all, especially if, like my kitchen timer, there is only one and it is in constant use. If you don’t like the chicken-ey look of the thing, buy me one that works that we all like. And having more of some things than most people also isn’t hoarding, if they are actually needed & being used, like the contents of my spice rack. I do know that most people do not have 20 different herbs and spices in their kitchen, but I cook 95% of our meals & snacks from scratch and all of those are ingredients in things I prepare & cook regularly. Not one of them is anywhere near out of date.

Sometimes “hoarding” is simply a response to rapidly-changing circumstances. Yes, there are probably too many baking tins in my cupboard, but as the number of people in the household is still subject to dramatic variations in a very short time, I still do need four loaf tins some of the time, and often without notice. However I will concede that we have far too much cutlery; since we no longer have a dishwasher, we no longer need 4 x 7 of everything. But it’s good, well-balanced stainless steel stuff, and we do have space to store it, so I am not planning to throw it out just yet but to Freecycle it when it’s clear that none of you needs it. I am also really, really narked about plastic ice-cream tubs, which are stealing some of the space that the loaf tins could otherwise sensibly be kept in; why can they not be recycled in our area? The answer here is obvious; not to buy ice-cream, but to make it in future, if people think they really need it.

And where do you draw the line between “preparedness” and hoarding? There are two big packs of lentils in my cupboard that have gone out of date; I am still planning to eat them as they’re not that far gone (late 2011) and I won’t replace them until they are nearly empty, but I do believe in keeping some basic stocks in hand in case of unexpected contingencies. In a large household, that means more than in a smaller one; a tray of twenty tins of baked beans isn’t a hoard, it’s just a month’s supply in a household that contains 3 or 4 young men. I also like to buy plenty of storeable food when I see a good deal; I do rotate the stocks as things come in so that the oldest get used up first. But that’s why it takes me an hour to unpack our monthly supermarket shop & there are tins & packets all over the kitchen floor for that hour; if you’re tripping over it, it makes more sense to help me do it properly than to shout at me.

And anyone who recycles my carefully-saved jamjars just as we come into peak preserving season clearly hasn’t learnt the lesson from when their father recycled all my wildly-expensive Le Parfait jars “because they hadn’t been used in weeks…”

Well, I do feel better for getting that off my chest – oh dear, chests – yes, I do need to do something about the two chests of perfectly-good fleece under the stairs…

Edited to add: in case you think I’m backtracking or prevaricating up above, more stuff went out today – another bootload to the Tip, & the boot has now been refilled with things to drop off to a charity shop tomorrow. A big bag of yarn went off to two young friends starting to knit, and some needlework kits flew away on Freecycle. Two items sold, one on Ebay (off to the States!) & one elsewhere. And it’s a free listing weekend on Ebay so I’ve earmarked at least 3 other items to list, one of them large… but there are still several huge piles of stuff to tackle. Slow & steady wins the day…

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…

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!

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!

It’s raining again…

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…and after the last two summers, a grey day makes my heart sink and has me straight out inspecting my tomatos & potatos for the first signs of blight. But when I walked up to town earlier, the level of the river was really quite low, so I guess we do need this downpour. As long as there’s plenty of sunshine to follow it up & ripen my figs…

redcurrants

It’s been a busy week and I haven’t had much time to devote to recycling or anything interesting, really. I did manage to re-boil my strawberry jam, which I’d bottled just short of setting somehow. So I added the last of the garden redcurrants, to try to boost the pectin levels, and boiled it until I was sure of the wrinkles on the testing plate, then poured it into clean Kilner jars, gleaned from the Tip a few weeks ago. I had been ignoring old-style Kilners, knowing that the original company had gone bust some years ago, but these had some original, unused lids with them. There must have been 30+ “dual purpose” jars in the box, and only 9 lids, but I didn’t have time to see whether there were any more when I picked them up. When I got home & discovered that there weren’t, I tried Googling “Kilner jar lids” & came up with this little gem of a site: Kilner Jars & Parts. So now I can “rescue” them again! But I’m not likely to need to, for the foreseeable future, with more than 30 to use & re-use…

The Transition Town Wimborne meeting was hugely encouraging; we really didn’t know how many people might turn up, or what level of awareness there was “out there” about Transition, so a turn-out of 19 was a fantastic boost. There were lots of different talents & interests represented; now we need to spread the word, reach more people & raise awareness that there are potential problems ahead, but there are also plenty of positive things we can do to adapt to them. Next meeting: Thursday 6th August, venue to be confirmed, with a film showing, probably The Power Of Community.

Off now to work on some bits to sell at the upcoming Colehill Country Fair – free stalls for local crafters being an irresistible offer!

When life starts blowing raspberries at you…

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…get out your preserving pan!

A couple of the stalls at our local market are happy to give their “unfit for human consumption” greens away to local pet owners, and I’m a regular beneficiary of this bounty; my chickens eat “freegan” greens for 5 days out of 7, most weeks, and roadside dandelions or allotment weeds for the rest of the time. And once in a while, a little work with a sharp eye and a knife leaves something I’m happy to feed to my kids too; we had a very good stir-fry last weekend that only cost about £3 to feed seven people, thanks to a sack of sweetheart cabbages that weren’t nearly as grotty inside as their outer leaves suggested.

Anyway, today I was given a sack with a load of broccoli on top, some of it clearly still very palateable. I duly thanked them and started home, but something was drippping from the bottom of the sack – red juice. Beetroot, I thought. But when I got home & opened it up, there were hordes of cartons of squished raspberries; there were a few little flecks of mould and quite a few flecks of wandering broccoli, but when I’d sorted through I was left with 1.8Kg of squashy but useable raspberries. Jam time! Luckily I had plenty of sugar in. So out came my carefully-saved jamjars, and my big saucepan, and we now have 6½ jars of delicious homemade raspberry jam! Off now to make the scones, using kefir made with Freecycled grains and stainless steel scone cutters gleaned a couple of years ago from the tip. Time to start saving jars again, and it won’t matter quite so much that most of our homegrown raspberries never make it as far as the kitchen door…

Nearly-freegan Jam!
Nearly-freegan Jam!

In a ferment…

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Useful things, jars. Sadly it’s a bit too easy to come by them at the moment, and thus to take them for granted and send them off for recycling, or even just throw them away. More than once I’ve had to run out at the last moment & buy preserving jars to make jam, because Him Indoors has happily decluttered my unruly hoard. For jam you need lots of small jars, but some of the other things I like to make need larger jars, and they are surprisingly difficult to track down as “there’s no call for them any more…” So whenever anyone has any, there’s a queue for them! I was delighted to find several very large glass jars, with lids, at the Tip a few weeks ago. One has gone to my neighbour to house a Kombucha SCOBY that I passed onto her so that she can make her own Kombucha tea. One’s been filled with home-made Kimchi, a Korean version of Sauerkraut, which is providing a delicious accompaniment to my lunch every day, though sadly I can’t persuade anyone else to try it. And one has just been filled up with onions which I hope will pickle gently in good time for Christmas. The Kimchi recipe has worked really well, much better than the last one I tried, and the result is not only tasty but crunchy too, so I thought I’d try making pickled onions by lacto-fermentation this time, rather than by vinegar pickling. And a couple of mid-sized jars and a kindhearted fellow-Freecycler have allowed me to restart my adventures & experiments with Kefir; there’s cheese a-making even as I type…

And then there’s bottles. I’m still hoping to acquire more swing-cap bottles, but they’re fiendishly expensive to buy new. I have enough for most of the Kombucha, but sadly my ginger beer is having to ripen in plastic bottles for now. Ah well, at least they are being re-used, and it only tends to stay in the bottles for long enough to become drinkable.

For some reason, this house is good at fermentation – perhaps because there’s always something more interesting to do than clean it! I noticed years ago that if I left a saucer of milk down overnight for the cats, in the morning I’d have a saucer of yogurt. No effort needed on my part at all, no scalding or sterilising, and it never seemed to be “off” milk, just nice thick creamy yogurt which the cats enjoyed hugely. When I tried making a sourdough starter, it started to bubble gently within a day. But it’s not popular with the family, so mostly I don’t bother, but it’s nice to know I can make bread with no hi-tech ingredients if I ever need to.

I remember one of my friends laughing gently at me at the school gates a few years back, and saying, “Oh come on! Life’s too short to make your own marmalade, when you can just go out & buy it!” Well, where’s the fun in that?