Harvest time!

Galeuse d'eysines

We harvested the Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin and the Cheyenne bush pumpkin late last week....

I was so proud! I haven't weighed them yet but they're safely stored, curing in the greenhouse for the next week and a half, then I'm going to have to find a cool place in the flat to keep them.

I'm hoping to carve them both at Halloween, and maybe make a pumpkin pie... and pumpkin bread... maybe pumpkin muffins...we're going to have a lot of pumpkin to use up!

Cheyenne Bush Pumpkin

Cheyenne bush pumpkin... late, but I'm
going to give it a chance!

Small galeuse d'eysines - still on the vine

Me and my very first Galeuse d'eysines

Good morning world!

I have so many posts to finish and upload, but for now, some photos I took on my way to work.

Getting up before sunrise has it's advantages sometimes, I love walking through the city as it wakes up, it's just such a shame I have to go to work after my early morning stroll

Notes from the Garden.....Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin...part 2

Over the past month, the pumpkin really took off and I finally realised what it was....a Galeuse d'eysines's pumpkin..... and it should eventually look like this

Close up of Big Daddy....isn't he beautiful?

Introduction...

After emigrating twice (to Australia and back) in just over two years, we are finally settled back in London, living in a two bed, garden flat in East Dulwich with our adopted cat, Cleo. We dream (plan.....scheme) of buying land in rural Ireland and building an eco friendly home from reclaimed, recycled materials and living as self sufficiently as possible...

Our plan is to transition our lives and lifestyle from city living, I work in an office and M works in construction, to an environmentally friendly homestead/small holdings in Ireland. I'm an amature but enthusiastic gardener, my favourite things are; cloud watching, reading, photography, homesteading, food, permaculture, reading, tea, cheese and dolce far niente

Blog Entries....

I have been planning this blog for a while so some of the posts will be backdated from earlier this year. And I  have some posts on our garden and some of the foodie courses I did while we were living in Perth last year, so there will be lots of updates on the blog in the coming weeks

TomAto Tomato

After decided to take down all the tomato plants to make room for a winter greenhouse, we had a lovely mixed harvest of "Jen's tangerine" heirloom tomatoes as well as red, yellow (another heirloom variety called Galina) and green cherry tomatoes.

This was my chance to try out some chutney recipes I'd found on a fantastic blog I'd been reading recently, Life in Mud Splatted Boots and in my lovely Preserves book.

We'd been harvesting tomatoes for about a month and a half and I estimated we had picked about 5-6 kilos of tomatoes in total. Not bad, considering the small tomatoes weren't planted outside until mid June! I seriously underestimated how big the plants were going to get, and to be honest I didn't think all the heirloom seedlings would all survive being transplanted so late in the season...but they did, and they flourished! It turned into a tomato jungle and I couldn't bear to remove any of the plants - I was so proud of the heirloom seedlings that had survived and I wanted to see what the tomatoes would look and taste like. I'm going to plan the garden space properly for next Summer, and lessons learned, the Galina yellow cherry tomato plants grew to about six feet and very bushy and the bright yellow tomatoes looked beautiful next to the dark green leaves.

Seedlings - pre planting... It looks so bare!

Small tomato plants

Tomato plants before I staked them with Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin to the right - starting to take over the patio  

Close up of a spider that made his home in the tomatoes for about two months, I moved the little guy to another part of the garden before taking the tomato plants down

Galina yellow cherry tomatoes

Jen's Tangerine tomatoes, yellow Galina cherry tomatoes and bush cherry tomatoes with a couple of Summer crookneck squash

Tomato harvest


Chutney recipes and oven dried tomato recipes to follow...

Oven Dried Yellow Cherry Tomatoes

 This is the first time I tried oven drying tomatoes and it was so easy!

You will need

Tomatoes – I used yellow cherry tomatoes

Sea salt

Thyme – either fresh and finely chopped or dried

Preheat oven to 100 C

Slice cherry tomatoes in half and arrange on a wire rack on a baking tray skin side down.

Sprinkle each half tomato with salt and leave a few minutes so the salt starts to draw out some of the moisture.

Add a small sprinkle of thyme to each tomato half

Pop into the oven and leave for about 3-4 hours

The cherry tomatoes had shrunk down to almost large current size when I took them from the oven and had such a tangy tomato taste.

I put half of the tomatoes into a small plastic container and froze them and I let the other half cool and mixed them into a jar with very (very) finely chopped garlic and a good glug of olive oil. 

They will keep in the fridge in oil for about 4 days, but should not be stored like that any longer. The best way to store your dried tomatoes is to freeze them, otherwise you could risk botulinum toxin developing!

I had had some of the dried tomatoes in olive oil and garlic with a bagel smothered in cream cheese and smoked salmon, but unfortunately don’t have a photo as I ate it too quickly...

Sweet Tomato & Ginger Chutney

I found this fabulous recipe on the lovely Life in Mud Spattered Boots blog and it worked beautifully on using up some of the glut of tomatoes we had after the "harvest"

You will need

1 kg red (cherry) tomatoes – I mixed a few yellow tomatoes in with the red ones and the chutney had a lovely reddish orange colour when it was finished

1 clove garlic

1 piece stem ginger

250g granulated sugar

500ml vinegar (I used white wine vinegar, but you can use cider vinegar otherwise if you like)

1 tsp salt

Optional – finely chopped fresh chilli if you have it, I didn’t but I used a small pinch of dried chilli flakes instead

Finely chop ginger and garlic and roughly chop tomatoes

Place into a large pan with the vinegar and the salt, sugar and chilli (if using), bring to the boil and then simmer for 2 hours until thickened

Bottle as usual

I'm looking forward to trying this with some cold sliced ham and potato salad, yum!

Green Tomato Chutney

Green Tomato Chutney

I (slightly) improvised on this recipe from my Preserves* book

Ingredients

1 kg green (cherry) tomatoes – roughly chopped

250g cooking apple – peeled, cored and chopped

1 large garlic clove – finely chopped

1 tsp sea salt

300 ml cider vinegar

250g granulated sugar

Tablespoon pickling spice (I made my own, but there’s lots of easy tasty recipes available online if you want a stronger flavour)

Claire’s pickling spice

1 tsp all spice

1 tsp ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp dried coriander

Tsp cloves

2 bay leaves

Bash all spices together in pestle and mortar, spoon into muslin and tie tightly into little sachet – I didn’t have muslin or cotton, so I used a scrap of fabric I had in the house...it worked perfectly, but meant my spice sachet was green rather than the usual white.

Place tomatoes, apple, onion and garlic in a large pan and add the salt. Stir well to mix ingredients

Add sachet of pickling spice and half the vinegar, stir well again and bring to the boil

Reduce the heat and simmer for 1 hour until chutney is thick and pulpy

*Stir often

Place sugar and remaining vinegar into a small pan and heat gently, stirring until sugar is dissolved

Add to chutney, mix together well and simmer for a further hour and a half until chutney is thick.

*Stir occasionally

Remove spice sachet from the chutney and spoon the hot chutney into warm sterilised jars

Cover and seal immediately

Chutney should be stored in a cool, dark place and it will need to mature for at least one month before eating.

* Preserves - Catherine Atkinson & Maggie Mayhew

Christmas Puddings

It's Christmas Pudding time!

I'd been thinking about making Christmas puddings for the first time, and I thought my week off after our trip to the Czech Republic would be perfect. But, as per usual I managed to do not that much during the week but not get around to making any puddings either.... so I finally found some time in my busy schedule and started Saturday morning around 11 and finished up around 12:30 Sunday morning. I think they turned out pretty well for a first try, but I can't actually report back with a verdict until December 25th.... they look and smell delicious anyway!

I found the recipe here, then halved the quantities and changed some of the measurements to metric to make things easier for myself

Makes:

1 x 1.5 litre pudding

2 x 0.5 litre puddings

5 eggs

125 g plain white flour

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp all spice

1 tsp nutmeg

50 g chopped almonds

1 small cooking apple peeled and grated

225 g light brown flour

1 small carrot grated

rind and juice of a small orange and lemon

680 g mixed raisins and sultanas

100 g candied cherries

300 g bread crumbs (you can use white if you like, but I used wholemeal crumbs)

150 g candied peel

1/2 pint Guinness

225 g butter

I started by blitzing some "tasty wholemeal" bread in the blender, then mixed the crumbs with the rest of all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. I rubbed the raisins and other dried fruits with the flour and spice mix... use your hands and mix well... then I cut the butter into small pieces (lumps) and mixed this in with the fruit and spices. This is a lovely sticky job, I got covered in spices and bits of fruit and it started to smell really Christmassy...

In a separate bowl, I combined all the liquid ingredients, then added that to the dry ingredients and mixed it all together really well. The batter should be quite loose, like thick cake mix; if it's too dry, add a splash more Guinness.

After greasing the small bowls with butter and cutting a circle of greaseproof paper and putting that in the bottom of the big bowl then greasing that too; I filled all the pudding bowls to within about an inch of the tops.

I covered them using greaseproof paper, with a pleat folded in the middle (to give the steam some room) and secured well with string, then covered with tinfoil and secured tightly with more string.

And I managed to fashion a little handle for the larger bowl with more of the string, which I was really glad I did as it came in handy when I needed to lift it out of the slow cooker.

And here, I will advise you to cook your puddings according to whatever method suits you best. I used my large slow cooker for the big pudding, that took about twelve hours, and I boiled the two small puddings in two separate saucepans on the cooker for about seven hours.

My two little puddings, covered with greaseproof paper and lids firmly wedged down

The slow cooker and both saucepans with the small puddings needed topping up with boiling water at least every couple of hours. I thought the slow cooker would barely need a refill, but I had to add boiling water about four times during cooking. 

I checked all the puddings with a wooden skewer to make sure they were properly "done" (I was somehow still paranoid even though they'd been steamed for seven and twelve hours) and after letting them go cold over night, I removed the greaseproof paper and tinfoil and dribbled a generous "tablespoon" of brandy onto the medium pudding and about a teaspoon onto the small puddings, I sealed them back up in greaseproof paper and tinfoil and put them away to mature until Christmas. 

The pudding will need to be steamed for an hour before serving; you can either removed the wrapping and return to the original bowl and stream again for an hour - or - unwrap the pudding and place it on a heatproof serving plate and microwave for 10 minutes at half power.

To light the pudding, pour a generous measure of warmed brandy or whiskey on top - light carefully - the blue flames should creep up the sides, but they won't last long!

My parents Christmas pudding, with flaming "sauce" - Christmas 2012

Serve with whipped cream, custard, brandy butter, ice cream.....