I'd decided not to make any more chutney this year as we haven't eaten much of last year's batch. However, I'd been given some green tomatoes that needed to be used up quickly and I had a surfeit of overgrown courgettes. Then a recipe for a green tomato and courgette pickle scribbled on the back of something else fell out of another book as I picked it up ... So I've made it. The thing with pickles and chutneys is that you mostly can't eat them straightaway as they need to mature. I want to try it and can't. I'll have to wait and try it with the Christmas cold meat leftovers.

I want to make a little bit of red onion jam to put in my offspring's Christmas stockings. They all love things like that and my husband wouldn't touch it but should there be a little pot left for me, I'll be well pleased. I've still got a few windfalls left so I'm wondering about a small amount of chilli jelly for their Christmas stockings as well. And that is another thing my husband would not even consider trying. He is very conservative in his tastes although he is incredibly more willing to give things a trial than when I first met him.

My offspring all love their Christmas stockings and I find it quite a fun challenge to fill them with nice things at little or no cost. Once upon a time I thought that stockings would stop when they left home but they enjoy them too much and were horrified the first year I didn't do them. I collect bits and pieces all year but now it is September, the hunt for things that they will like is well and truly on. They get a mixture of fun things and nice things with a sprinkling of useful things thrown in too. Last year, for example, I happened to be in a branch of Tesco which had reduced all the packets of clothespegs to 25p so guess what turned up in the stockings? My husband thought I had lost the plot there but they were all pleased to have a few extra. And they had a laugh when they unwrapped them. Wrapped, of course, in recycled paper. I keep a long cardboard tube from some turkey foil and wrap any reasonable sheets of Christmas paper around that so they can be stored safely until the next Christmas but not take up too much space anywhere.