Update

 They just kept my granddaughter in hospital for one night but did a large array of tests. The GP is supposed to take over now. They want regular blood tests and she was supposed to be having one tomorrow but that has been cancelled because the nurse who does the blood tests is now in isolation... So we are suspended in limbo for a bit while we wait to see what happens next. At least they have ruled out a lot of the nasties that could have been causing some of the symptoms so I am sleeping a bit better now : )

I was given a few quinces by a kind neighbour so I have made quince jelly which will be another thing to add to my Christmas hampers. However, both my HMSO and my WI jam recipe books said to add half an ounce of citric acid which I happened to have in my cupboard, wonder of wonders. But I was saving on time so when I weighed my sugar out in a bowl, I added the citric acid in on top..... and a clump of citric acid fell out and I had added twice as much as I needed. I could not tell the difference between the citric acid and the sugar so I just had to add it all. It is an incredible colour, very jewel-like but with a definite tang of lemon in the flavour. I think I had better label it as "quince and lemon jelly" and it will make a very pleasant alternative to marmalade for breakfast. Next time I get given quinces, I will make very sure that I weigh out the citric acid separately!

Tomatoes and more

 It was my birthday this weekend and I have had a lovely time. All three of my children have been for a doorstep chat along with most of my grandchildren : ) I have also had emails and phone calls and cards through the door from various friends. My littlest grandson had made some biscuits for me and they taste lovely although they are weird and wonderful shapes : )

I have been preserving tomatoes in oil for the winter. I did not have enough of our own tomatoes to preserve so they will all be eaten fresh or at least as fried green tomatoes. However I found some cherry tomatoes and baby plum tomatoes on offer in Aldi and Lidl and I now have 3 jars of roasted tomatoes preserved in oil sitting in the fridge. I had in mind that they would be a great treat in the winter but I am going to have trouble keeping my hands off them as they taste fantastic.

I read this article (and there is a video too):

https://theelliotthomestead.com/2020/08/preserved-tomatoes-in-olive-oil/

I have had an eventful day today. I was in school this morning and wanted to call at the shops on the way home, making it a multipurpose journey. In my area, they have been campaigning and complaining for many years about the amount of traffic that goes up the main road. So to try and alleviate this, they have blocked off all the side roads which means that all traffic must go up the main road. There is a major T-junction off the main road and they have blocked off all the side roads off this road too. We are going to be using a lot more petrol because there are no short routes left. Think going around three sides of a square to get from A to B every time with long queues everywhere. Honestly, where are their brains and common sense? 

So I got what I wanted from the shop and got back to where I had left the car. This was quite some distance from the shops and it had started raining so I was soaked by the time I reached the car. I turned the car round and headed back up the road which leads to the T-junction. There is a junction with four-way traffic lights just up this road. I waited through seven sets of traffic lights to get to be the first car in the queue for these lights because they were only letting two cars through at a time. At the lights there is a pedestrian crossing with an island in the middle of the road. There are metal fences both on the island and on the pavement which narrows the road lane considerably. Guess where my car broke down......? Eventually several men left their cars to help me push it through the pedestrian crossing gap in the metal railings on to the pavement but by the time we had done that, I had about 400 yards worth of cars in the queue behind me. It is a good job that this didn't happen at rush hour! I was so embarrassed and so grateful for the help given.

Autumn jam

 I have made some Autumn Jam from bits and pieces of autumn fruit that I have acquired this week. I went on a walk with my daughter and little grandson and I was looking out for any fruit as I went along. We had passed several blackthorn bushes, each with two or three tiny sloes and then when we were nearly at the end, I spotted a lovely blackthorn just dripping with big, fat sloes and next to it was a crab apple tree, also dripping with fruit. I always keep a bag in my coat pocket in case I find anything suitable for my rabbit so I filled my small bag with sloes and crab apples. During the week, I got a handful each of blackberries, damsons and elderberries. Then I spotted that lots of my windfall apples were showing spots of brown so I made a great big bowl of stewed apple for the freezer and put the nicer bits of the peel and cores in my jam. 

My first idea was to make jelly but there was so much apple flesh in the pan that I ended up sieving it all and making a smooth jam. It is a beautiful red colour and tastes absolutely fantastic. And the hens kindly finished off all the stuff I had sieved out of my jam. So everybody is happy and I have a novelty jam to add to my Christmas hampers. Then today I was given several pounds of quinces so I now have quince jelly to make. I haven't got my hands on any quinces for many years so I am looking forward to that : )

Drying stuff

A friend has just acquired a dehydrator at a car boot sale. They were going to stay in their caravan for a couple of weeks so she offered to let me have the use of it while they were away. So I have been drying stuff. I have two big jars of dried apple rings, although some of the "rings" are slightly funny shapes because almost all the apples I have are windfalls. I also have almost a 1lb jam jar full of dried and powdered kale to add to winter soups/stews/whatever is suitable. I had three huge "bouquets" of kale, each one bigger than I could hold in my hands and when dried and powdered, it has all gone down to just under a jam jar full. I could not believe how much it reduced down. I have been reading about how kale is a super food and so a half teaspoonful in lots of things should give us lots of health benefits, hopefully. I was thinking about winter colds and flu and the coronavirus and that all this kaley goodness might help and certainly won't hurt.

I have also dried and powdered rosemary, sage and thyme. A vast pile of the herbs has been reduced to half a smaller jam jar worth of powder. I intend to mix it with some salt to have "Herb Salt". Some of it is for me and some to pop in Christmas hampers as something different. This is another thing i have been reading about. The idea is that not only is it flavourful but if you use the same amount as you usually use of salt, you will end up using less because of the herb content. Hopefully it will have more flavour than bought because it is made with home grown herbs. I am also looking for interesting and inexpensive ways of padding out the Christmas hampers as I am still doing considerably less shopping than I used to.

I went though the French beans at the allotment and was amazed at how many beans I have missed. I was hoping for a few to keep as seed for next year but there were so many! Last night I watched a film on the tv while podding the beans and put them in the dehydrator overnight - apart from a few to be kept for seed. I now have a jam jar of dry beans to keep for the winter. I foresee a couple of bean stews in our future. I am now absolutely convinced that there are no beans left but I daresay that I will find a few when we pull the plants up next time we are down at the allotment : )

I am now looking around to see what else I can dehydrate for the last couple of days while I have the use of the dehydrator. I have had fun. I want a dehydrator now. Maybe I need to write a letter to Santa this year...

Even more preserving

No jams or pickles this time. I've picked more blackberries. It really has been a good year for them. There are now between 7 and 8 lbs of them in small bags in the freezer all ready for the winter. I love them with plain yoghurt and a tiny sprinkle of honey nut cornflakes or granola for a bit of crunch. I reckon I must have picked about 16-17 lbs of them this year and there are still more to ripen on the bush.

Mind you, my hands do look like I've been blackberry picking. My thumb nails and index finger nails are very stained and the stains will have to wear off because they don't scrub off. And there are more than a few scratches on my hands. I did remember to wear an old microfleece jacket to protect my arms this year and that has worked. I've just got to remember that for next year now...

More preserving

I picked another 4lbs of blackberries and made another 10lbs of blackberry and apple jam yesterday. That means that I can pop a jar into each family stocking at Christmas. And with stockings in mind, I made a batch of red pepper and chilli jam today. They all love chilli and they had some lovely big red peppers in Lidl today and it is another thing to fill up those stockings. I got the recipe on another blog here: 

http://www.cottagesmallholder.com/red-pepper-garlic-and-chilli-jam-recipe-8963/

A new thing that I am trying is strawberry soda. It seems to be a bit like elderflower champagne but made with strawberries. It is a sparkling fruit drink but non-alcoholic. It is bubbling away furiously in the kitchen so it is nearly ready to try. I am looking forward to that. I got the recipe from another blog here: 

https://zerowastechef.com/2019/09/02/fermented-strawberry-soda/

Even more cooking

My friend gave me the last of her cucumbers when she cleared the cucumber plants out of the ground. She has had a fantastic crop from those three plants this year. I made some more sweet cucumber relish so that is three double batches made this year. The main ingredients are cucumbers, onions, celery and peppers and each batch has had slightly different proportions of these, according to what I had in the house. It will be interesting to see which batch I like best.

However, everybody will definitely have a pot of this in their goody boxes this Christmas! Or else I'll never get through it all... I have tried some from the first batch and I really like it, which is just as well. I have also eaten a lot of cucumber over the summer thanks to my friend. I do hope she doesn't decide to grow fewer plants next summer : )

386 items gone

More cooking

We went to the allotment and picked all the rest of the raspberries. I prepared some more of the windfall apples I was given and made jam with the apple and raspberries with a handful of medlars and some late blackberries that were in a sheltered corner and one or two other bits and pieces. Hence the name raspberry allsorts jam. I had saved all the nicer bits of peel and cores from the apples and made some pectin stock which included our entire grape crop from this year (all five little bunches of unripe grapes) so I used a pint of that to help stretch the jam to another pot or two.

I still have marmalade to make and I'll stretch that with a little extra pectin stock too. I want to make some orange marmalade but I've also got a recipe for apple marmalade and I have yet more windfalls to use up... : )

Yesterday I was down at church making soup. Pumpkin soup - seven gallons of it.... Guess what is the "special" for next week? That is right - pumpkin soup for bonfire night. It will go in their freezer in tubs all ready to be taken out one at a time as needed. It took about six hours of chopping etc to produce that quantity of soup. And I was in bed early and slept well!

I meant to add in the last post that I'd been productive this weekend and pickled two jars of eggs.  My little bantam lays lovely eggs with a pale cream shell and very pointed at one end. - a totally different shape to the eggs the others lay. She is one of the two females that we hatched at school last year and is a lovely natured bird.  Very inquisitive and friendly. I can trust her enough to let her out for a run round the garden because I always know that she will come back to her run when the time is up. So I thought I'd do something with her eggs rather than just using them up two at a time which always feels a bit wrong after all her efforts.  Two weigh about 95 -100g so are way more than one normal egg.  I use three of them to replace two normal eggs if I am cooking/baking. My husband loves pork pie with his salad for lunch in the summer holidays and I'm not at all keen so I can have an egg now.  I do hope that I like pickled eggs : )

I used the recipe from the Simple Green Frugal Coop:

http://simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/pickled-eggs-and-be-prepared-challenge.html

This one sounds milder than many recipes I've looked at.  I didn't like the sound of some of the highly spiced reciped that I found. It is economical to prepare because you can boil all the eggs at once and then use them as you want.  I asked on other forums (sp - should that be fora??) about keeping times once opened and the answer seemed to be months because of the vinegar.  I doubt that will be a problem, though, but it is good to know these things.

More apples processed.  Last night I boiled up the 6.5 lbs of apple puree that I'd cooked and sieved on Saturday and Sunday and produced 14 small jars of Potted Apple as mentioned in a previous blog.  However, I did not have the required cloves.  Nor, it turned out, did I have any cinnamon.  So I rootled around in the cupboard and came up with some garam masala, whose main ingredient seems to be cinnamon.  However, I got slightly carried away so I now have 14 small jars of what needs to be described as Spiced Potted Apple........  It will probably taste wonderful with meat but I can't see me using any  with yoghurt : )

The school chicks are nearly grown up now.  They are 15 weeks old this week and they are all lovely.  Unfortunately one of the three is male.  Apparently, I read somewhere, 55% of chicks turn out to be male so to have two of the three female is pretty good going.  However, every time the headmaster meets me in the corridor, he asks when he is getting his chicken dinner.  It isn't funny any more because I have committed the cardinal error of getting too involved and I'm fond of the poor bird.  I'm beginning to wonder if I can get away with buying a chicken from Sainsburys.  Will they notice any difference?  Cockerels can be nice or they can be nasty and this one looks set to be a nice one.  Also, he looks very like a typical little brown hen so he isn't going to provide much of a dinner anyway.  He is a skinny teenager right now.  Laying hens are very thin because all their energies go into egg production.  They are bred this way and you need an all-purpose "utility" bird like a Rhode Island Red or one of the varieties of Sussex to get a cockerel that would feed a family while the females lay a reasonable number of eggs.  Or else a Ross-Cobb or a Sasso or Hubbard or something like which all grow to look like the Sumo wrestlers of the chicken world. 

I'm been busy with apples. Again. Still more to process.  I peeled and cored and cooked enough apple to give me 23 small jars of stewed apple to which I added sugar and lemon juice and then processed in a water bath.  I cooked the peel and core and a few chopped up small apples and strained them through my jelly bag and then sieved the must and added that to the stewed apple before I bottled it. With the juice, I made 6 jars of mint jelly which will be a couple for us and the rest in goody boxes for Christmas.  When I make it again, I will use more mint.  I stripped most of the leaves off my plant and chopped them up fine but the jelly could take being mintier.  I wanted some leaves left to make a jar of concentrated mint sauce to keep in the fridge to go with the half a lamb that we bought, most of which is still in the freezer. Next time, I would also add a small quantity of vinegar (cider vinegar, maybe?) to add a little more piquancy as it is quite sweet.  My husband likes it but then he has a sweet tooth.

We had lamb for dinner (with the spoonful of mint jelly that would not fit in the jars) on Monday night because it was my birthday.  It was a good meal!  Yesterday was my son's birthday so we had a grand family get-together last weekend which was fun.  I do enjoy it when my family gets together for a meal and I would really miss that if we moved out of the area to find a smallholding.

With some more of those apples, I was wondering about trying the potted apple from Tracing Rainbow's blog.  No water bath needed. The recipe was taken from Mary Norwak's "Lark Rise Recipe Book " which was published in 1986.
http://angalmond.blogspot.com/2011/09/potted-history.html

I'd also like to put a few bags of prepared apple (large size pieces) in the freezer for apple pies.  Then maybe the good ones can be kept a while for gradual using a few at a time.  Considering that I was scrounging around for apples when I starting my annual preserving binge, I've ended up with absolutely loads.  One lady at work has two apple trees and was offering to share her bounty and had no takers apart from me. I had too many little plums and had difficulty finding someone to help with the surplus.  With the current uncertain economic climate, I would have expected people to be more interested in free food, not less.  Nowt so queer as folk, as they say.