Tomatoes


I love to grow tomatoes ever year they are such a rewarding fruit to have in the garden and i don't mind giving them the love they deserve to bear the fruits we love so much.  I always grow some from seed and and also buy a couple of plants in too so i have plants a different stages as well as back up in case of mishap with seedlings.

Christmas cake 2011

We were always Christmas bugs, now we have Sophie, Ali and i are really enjoying the value of Christmas, its has more fun, anticipation and excitement and we feel were giving the gift of a memory of our own family Christmas to Sophie for her to remember when she is older.  Althought Ali and I are still finding our feet with working out all those little touches and bringing them together to make a special day.  The last 10 years we have been spoilt rotten by Ali's mum and dad who have had us to their house every year and fed us and have show that with the years of experience how smoothly the day and the build up to the day goes, they are so calm and experienced and we have a lot to aspire to.

Sloe wine

Out and about foraging again and this weekend we planned to gather Sloes, we have loads and loads where we live so are never in short supply after picking quite a few we gave them a good wash and stuck them in our big pan and added water and brought to just boiling heat and turned the heat off and left over night.

Elderberry wine

Today we are making Elderberry wine, we had loads of success earlier in the year with elderflower and lemon cordial so we were watching and waiting for the elderberries to be ready, when they were we picked like mad as we have quite a few things brewing and popping away and a few more planed through the month so needed to get the elderberries picked and processed to to maximise our time and fermenting buckets.




We managed to gather 6kg of berries and had the very long task of picking them all off the stalks, so we stuck a good long movie on cracked open a bottle of wine we had made from the previous year and settled into picking. it took a few hours and we were so relieved when we had finished.
 

 Next we gave them a good mash with the potatoe masher and added 4 liters of boiling water and let it steep for 24 hour.  the next day Ali added 1.5kg of sugar used his hydrometer to see how boozy it would be and added 1tsp of yeast for every gallon of liquid and gave it a good stir the put it all in the fermenting bucket to pop away for a week.

Later we are planning to strained to get rid of any little bits and decanted into demijohns and leave for a few weeks to finish before bottling up.  I cant wait for this brew to finish as it smells really fruity and full.
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Sophie's first day at pre school


Sophie started pre school today, we were both looking forward to it, being coped up with mummy everyday must be boring and she has got to a point that she needs a little space to learn to grow and find her feet a bit more she is just 2 and is one of the youngest there.  Being the youngest doesn't hold her back at all, when i dropped her off she went in and didn't even bother to look back and say goodbye the room looked to inviting and to fun and she was gone.  A few hours later i went to pick her up and apparently she made all the ladies laugh at song time as she got up in front of the class and did some funky dance moves to the singing.  She made a nice purple painting played with the toys and made new friends.  She left shouting yey school.

Good first day  

Apple crisps



With the bumper crop of apples this year we have turn most into Cider but there are still loads left and not wanted to fill my freezer with apple pies and puree as freezer space is a premium, i decided to make apple crips, the idea was inspired from Ali's M&D who last year made thicker apple rings they dried out over their Aga.  Not having an Aga myself needed a thinner option so made apple crisps, which are fabulous and intensely appley.   

Boozy fruit for Christmas


This is something that is in my cupboard all year round its also great for Easter Simnal cake and blended up for mince pies as i don't like suet in my mince pies, nice in light fruit cake and of course Christmas cake.

Get a big bowl and mix everything together store in jar and if your passing it in the kitchen give it a jiggle let this stand for about 6 weeks before making Christmas cake. 


Ingredients

100 ml apple juice
35cl bottle of brandy (thats 1 mini bottle of brandy)
good slug of kir 
100g Figs
200g Rasins
200g Sultans
200g Currents
200g Cranberrys
100g Dates
200g Dried Cherries  (I'm not keen on glace cherries)
1 x Lemon and 1 x Orange zest ( again im really not keen on mixed peel but i love zest)
3 tbsp of course marmalade i use my whisky marmalade


Waddesdon Manor Chilli Festival



Today we headed out to the Waddesdon manor Chilli festival, Free to get in and was rather fun, we had planned to go to a larger Chilli festival earlier in the year but we didn't go as this was around Sophie's attack, so we were please that this small and near one came to town.

There were many stalls, all but 1 selling chilli products, the one that didn't i thought to be the clever one they were selling cool yoghurt and they cornered the market, what smarty pants they are.

Home cured bacon



Im getting so fed up of paying expensive prices for low quality stuff, one of these bug bears is bacon, as autumn approaches i tend to use more bacon than normal to form base flavours in recipes.  the supermarket bacon is awful they just pump it with saline and leave it 24 hours before selling it, and when you get it home it seems to become the norm that when you cook it you get loads of scummy white liquid leaking out of the stuff  while it cooks, it also doesn't taste of much apart from salty fiber meat in my opinion. 


So i decide to have a go at making my own bacon, i quite like streaky bacon as it has more flavour, so got two large bit of belly of pork, as that is the part of the pig that makes streaky bacon.  I got two as i wanted to try two different methods a wet cured and dried cured, just so i could understand the process and of course the taste.


I asked the butcher to trim out the bones which we had as spare ribs for lunch, and when i got home i stabbed my 2 x belly of pork with a sharp knife just to help the curing process get through the meat. 

Dry process
First i worked on the dry curing and i made the cure mix which was 2 cups of salt and 1 cup of dark brown sugar, i also added some pepper and dried thyme but you don't have to do this.  The sugar helps counteract the saltiness and keep the bacon moist and soft.
I also used saltpetre which is a nitrate, which can be hard to get hold of as it is the primary ingredient in gunpowder, however nitrates are essential as they help fight the against botulism and E coli  and is an important ingredient if making parma ham or chorizo as these are raw products.  However bacon and gammon are cooked through so kill these nasty bugs so nitrates are used in less quantities they also help the bacon keep its pink colour and not look grey like pork chop colour.  i used an egg cup full of saltpetre rubbing it into the nooks and crannys of the meat and paying attention to the bloody areas.  After the saltpetre was added i massaged the meat with my salt sugar cure mix.
After giving the meat a really good rub i put it in a plastic box and covered with the remaining cure mix.  It is important not to let the bacon come into contact with metal as it reacts with the curing process.  even when the bacon is sliced it is not stores in foil but rather cling film and frozen for when i need it next.

Every day liquid from the meat is draw out of the bacon from the salt in the cure mix i made and this will need to be drained off and the meat turned, you only have to do this for 3 days but if you want parma ham do it for 7- 10 days.  After this give the meat a really good wash in cold water and then slice and enjoy.  I have a food slicer but i found that it really helps to put the meat in the freezer for 1 hour just to firm it up a bit for slicing.


Wet process
This one was a doddle i simple used the new washing up bowl we bought for camping recently as it was the perfect size and was not metal.  Then i made a basic brine using 500g of salt, 6 litres of water and 3 tbsps of white sugar.  then i just forgot about it for 3 days and let it do its thing.  After this just wash and slice as before with the dry process bacon.  You can also use the wet process to make back bacon if you like that which comes from the loin of the pig where the chops come from.

So below i took pictures of the 2 meats cut and laid out for you to see the colour difference between the two bacon's, the first one is the wet process and is a more fleshy plump lighter coloured bacon, very tasty and i think i will use this one for my base flavour in my recipes.  The bottom picture is the Dry process and is a firmer meat and very very tasty perfect for a butty or breakfast. When cooking the meat it didn't cook with all that horrid liquid coming out of it and it did not shrink, also i was very happy as i paid £8 for a side of belly and got £20 worth of bacon if i had bought the same weight from a supermarket and for a more inferior product.  I had read that people who make their own bacon don't buy it after making it and i have to agree i am now a convert for something so simple and so very tasty. I was going to smoke the bacon as i have a smoker but it is a hot smoker and you need a cold smoke process something we would  have to make so i will have to appeal to Ali's man skills to hook a incinerator to some filing cabinets to make me a cold smoke house for sides of bacon and hams.


Cider time

We are lucky to have an apple tree in our garden, however when we moved into our house the previous occupants had knocked copper nails into the trunk and grown a huge amount of ivy all over the tree making it look a bit spooky, but worse was chocking the tree, also it created lots of mould and made the apples very small and very scabbing. We cleared the ivy which took ages and pulled the nails out and waited a few years, watching and waiting hoping the tree would revive and it did slowly each year the apples getting better. Last year we got enough good looking apples to make some cider it was a little sour but still nice considering the apples were still in recovery. This year we had a bumper crop of lovely looking apples that were crisp juicy and sweet.