Chunky Pumpkin and Orange Marmalade

I decided it was time to make use of my Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin. It had successfully stored in our (cold) hallway for about four months, but I fancied some pumpkin soup and really wanted to try to preserve the rest - or at least some - of the pumpkin and make it last a bit longer.

I found this delicious recipe on Nigella.com and altered it ever so slightly

Ingredients
2 kgs pumpkin
4 oranges (sweet & juicy)
1 lime (juiced)
1.5 kg sugar
2 cm fresh root ginger - shredded
Gelatine

Cut the pumpkin into large chunks (remove the seeds) and simmer in water for about 20 minutes until soft 

As my kitchen scales only goes up to 5kg, I had to wait until I'd managed to halve the pumpkin before I could weigh it... it came in at a fine weight of 7.5kg

Peel the oranges and remove the white parts from the skin – it will take at least half an hour to scrape all (well, most of...) the pith from the skin, much longer than I had anticipated! Chop the peel into small shreds

In a separate pot, mix ½ glass (I used a pint glass) of water with two spoons of sugar and cook the orange peels in it, until they are soft, this will take about 15-20 minutes. Cut the peeled oranges into pieces

When the pumpkin is soft, removed the skin and mix/smush the pumpkin – do not puree! I peeled the pumpkin into a large bowl, then roughly sliced it into chunks with a sharp knife.

Cook the pumpkin chunks, oranges, orange peels and lime juice for 20 minutes

Add the shredded ginger, rest of the sugar and some gelatine (I used one leaf) and let slowly boil for another 20 minutes. Pot into sterilized jam jars.

I initially thought 1.5 kg of sugar was far too much for this recipe, so I just used 1 kg, but after the marmalade had cooled, I realised it hadn't set properly and was quite...tangy. So I emptied all the jars back into the saucepans, reheated the marmalade back to a simmer and added the remaining ½ kg of sugar and another gelatine leaf and that seems to have done the trick! The pumpkin has stayed a bright orange colour and has turned almost translucent through cooking. The marmalade is still quite tangy - especially compared to the shop bought marmalade - which tasted sickly sweet after I’d sampled my homemade batch - and it has a lovely strong orange flavour and aroma and I think the chunks of pumpkin and orange work really well together.

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

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...