Adventures in my Kitchen

This post comes to you from my kitchen.  I had every intention of posting from my kitchen each season but that hasn't quite happened, the summer was a rather busy time and I hardly posted at all, ironic really when I had so much to write about.

The salve that I mentioned I had steeping the last time I posted from my kitchen sadly went mouldy.  That is the first time that has happened to me, the leaves were not all in the oil they were steeping in, their contact with the air, I think that is what caused it.  I threw it all in the compost bin and have started again, I hope this batch is good enough to make a salve with.  I need to buy some more jars for when the steeping is done.

I have been soaking and cooking pulses in industrial quantities periodically over the past months.  I buy my pulses dried mostly in 3kg bags, so that I didn't always have to remember to soak and cook them each time I needed them and to save energy by doing it with a larger batch every few months. I soak around half of the bag in a large bowl before cooking them all up.  I then freeze them in 250g quantities which is the approximate amount that you get in a can of pulses if you buy them that way.  I don't have to remember to get them out of the freezer hours before as most of the time I am throwing them into what I am cooking so they defrost in the heat of the food.  I am lucky to have a very large chest freezer in my garage which has plenty of space.  I always aim to have four or five different pulses out there and if they have just all been replenished there can be thirty or forty bags.  When I am down to the last one I will soak and cook some more to make sure I have a constant supply.  I got a bit out of this habit and have started it up again.  Now that it getting darker earlier I need to make sure that I get the right thing out, some of them look very similar in the dark!

I have mentioned in several posts recently about all the fundraising that we are currently doing to support Alice getting to South Korea next year.  We have been doing a lot of fundraising which has involved baking.  We have tried various recipes and how now settled on four cakes that we can make really quickly as we have done it so often.   It works best if Alice does most of the making and I do the clearing and washing up in between each cake and any of the prep that she finds hard or slows her down.  We have become a good team, the kitchen still ooks like a whirlwind has been through it by the time we have finished.  We make two gluten free cakes, a lemon drizzle and an almond and coconut traybake, and two gluten cakes, gingerbread and orange and poppyseed.  These were the ones that sold the best and we rarely come home with any much to the disappointment of my husband and Cameron.  We have had a bit of break from baking this month as none of the fundraising we have done has needed baking which has been really welcome.  We have plenty in the freezer now so next time we need cake we are good to go.

We had a good crop of edibles from the garden this year.  We are never going to reach a place where we are growing all our own food our tiny garden is way too small to reach that but we grow what we can.  We picked and froze 10lbs each of blackcurrants and whitecurrants.  I usually make these into a coulis type sauce over the winter months to give us all a good dose of vitamin C in the months when we need the most as there are so many more colds and the like around.  The rhubarb plants were less productive this year although they gave us a good crop, I have made huge amounts of rhubarb and orange sauce which is now in the freezer, I love having this on pancakes at breakfast time.  I need to split the rhubarb this autumn to encourage it to be a little more productive next year.  I have lots of friends who would like a plant for their gardens, rhubarb does well round here nearly every garden in my village seems to have a rhubarb plant although not all are being harvested from judging by the huge flower heads some display.

We have had an abundance of salad leaves, edible flowers and lettuce.  I didn't buy any of these for months.  I grow several different types of salad leaves, wild rocket being one of them it grows like a weed in my garden.  I tend to grow lettuce where you just pick the leaves, I can make them last for months if I water them well, they have finally gone to seed over the past couple of weeks.  My cucumbers, gherkins, tomatoes and courgettes did really well.  I managed to pickle one jar of gherkins this year as I discovered that I could add them as they are ready, it remains to be seen whether that works.  I have made several batches of courgette and brie soup which are now in the freezer to use up the last of the courgettes. I don't freeze it with the brie in it, I add this once it is defrosted.  Now that it has turned colder my leeks are doing well, I am picking chard and kale which I have in abundance, my cabbages are slowly growing and the purple sprouting broccoli has lasted another year and will hopefully flower again in the spring.  I have winter lettuces and salad leaves in the polytunnel which I hope will provided for us for a few more months before going dormant over the cold of winter.

We have moved to a more autumnal menu with soup, stews and bakes back on the menu.  I make full of use of my slow cooker which we purchased earlier this year.  There are a couple of days of the week when we are out in the afternoon until quite late and it is so good to come home to be able to put tea straight on the table as it has been cooking in the slow cooker.   I shared a couple of pages in my last post from a cookery book for a 'recipe' for a warm salad which is still a regular fixture on our menu.   There is also a page for a stew and also a grain bake using the same format.  I have been tried various combinations of these as I work with flavours and ingredients to find things that work, a buckwheat based bake as been the best attempt so far.

I thought I was going to lose my veg delivery box earlier this year.  The company I buy it from doesn't actually deliver to my village.  Unfortunately for us there is another company that does, it is CSA scheme from a local village, the share is small so it only does about one or two meals for us, because of that scheme this other larger company will not deliver as they would be in competition which I get.  We have been using a friend's address to bypass that but they were renting and told us at the beginning of the summer that they were having to move.  Luckily for us we have other friends in the same village so we were able to continue with our delivery.  I had hoped that a new organic veg shop was going to open in our nearest town but sadly the plug was pulled on the venture, I would have preferred to have visited a shop each week as I could buy what I wanted but the box is a good alternative to buying in the supermarket where everything is covered in plastic.  I had been finding that the box we had been having was no longer big enough for our needs so we have now increased to three boxes a week!  One is fruit which we get once a fortnight but even with three boxes it is really good value and far cheaper than buying elsewhere.  I have stopped buying any fruit and veg in the supermarket for the first time in years.  I would love to stop shopping in a supermarket completely but there are few items that I have not been able to find elsewhere so we still use it for a few things but the number of items is gradually dwindling, I hope that there will be a time when I can stop completely.  I much prefer to support local small businesses.

I dug out my elderberry syrup and the dregs of garlic syrup recently.  I made the garlic syrup years ago but it has lasted well, the elderberry was made last year and there is still plenty left.  They were so useful to have in the pantry when we all went down with some cold type virus recently.  A cup of elderberry syrup mixed with hot water is wonderful warming drink when you have a cold.  

I have been given a big bag of apples which I need to peel and do something with.  I will most probably cook some up into a chutney and make the rest into a sauce, freezing some and dehydrating the rest to make fruit leather.  I am also on the look out for some pickling onions which I also usually make at this time of year.  My husband loves pickled onions and this is lovely treat for late winter/early spring.  The last of my tomatoes have failed to ripen and probably won't now that the days are shorter and cooler.  I will be picking them soon to make some tomato ketchup with, they are mix of slightly ripened and green ones and they make a delicious ketchup despite not being ripe.  I don't have much room to store alot of food in my pantry once I have some chutney, pickled onions and ketchup the shelves will be full again.  We have run out of chilli jam so I will be making more of that once I have more chillis.

I watched a series of programmes about making sourdough bread.  It was a fascinating watch and I kept rewinding bits to watch techniques again.  I learnt so much and have been putting the various techniques into practice here.  I am now making bread rolls twice a week and they are much improved.  I think I might try making a loaf now, they have always been a bit of a disaster but I am feeling more confident with what I am doing now.  Like so many things it is not so much following a set of specific directions but having a go and getting a feel for it, I guess that is how all cooking skills would have been passed on before the days of recipe books.  There are so many factors that can effect a sourdough loaf that is easy to get disheartened, the beauty of a home made loaf is that it will not be the same each time you make it but that can make learning hard as a different thing may go wrong each time.  Those rather flat, teeth breaking loaves are not happening as often now which means I have less breadcrumbs to hand but we have more delicious bread to eat which is always a winner!

My kitchen is a busy place, I spend so much time in there so it is not surprising I have so much to write about.  Thank you for reading this long post.