With the garclic safely harvested, dried, and hung up, the gluts of everything else has started.
A couple of weeks ago DH made his first tomato passata batch of the year. It yielded 3x500ml jars, and it wasn't worth pasteurising such a small amount. A bit later he made another 3 jars. We've been using quite a lot of it.
About a week ago, he made a batch which yielded 5x500ml jars, so we got preston (our pressure canner) out of the utility room, and canned those. The next batch was 9x500ml jars.
I've also been enjoying tomato sandwiches - only ever worth making with home grown tomatoes that heave never seen the inside of a chiller.
Today DH is busy transforming some 8 or so kilos of tomatoes into passata, so it'll be 2 goes with Preston I think.
The courgettes are also starting to come through. Some were little marrows by the time they reached the kitchen, so I blitzed them and fed them to the chooks and the chicks. That went well. The next few I turned into courgette bread, which was rather good. We've had courgette bread quite a lot since then. I made another loaf today, but I don't know what I was thinking. I managed to leave out the yeast, so we have a very heavy lump.
My courgette repertoire is limited. I like it in home made coleslaw; I use it in pasta sauces; I like snall quantities thinly sliced (with a potato peeler) and dry fried; and I have a realiable recipe for courgette lemon drizzle cake. And the chools like it.
We're also getting a reasonable harvest of pears. The pears have some sort of scab on them, which makes them look unattractive. It's a shamwe, because it makes them hard to give away. However, the fruit underneath is fine. Pears typically go from rock hard and inedible to rotten within the space of a couple of days.
True to form the pears have been rock hard every day for the past couple of weeks; 3 days ago I found one that was edible, and I made caramelised roasted pears with a couple more; 2 days ago I picked some more that were ready (they came of when gently twisted), and I'm psyching myself up to make something with them . The picked ones have now reached the stage where they are juicy and very ripe, but they have tht grainy pear texture which I don't like.
I've got a recipe for lemon and pear butter, which I'll try. I'm reluctant to process them or dehydrate them, because I know we just won't eat them once that's done.
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| Showing their good side |
