Beans!!

Decided this week to try some of our own home-grown, home-dried beans for lunch in minestrone.

Here they are - soaked but not yet cooked

I was just a bit on the wary side as we've never dried beans before but soaked and boiled them as for shop-bought dried pulses- and we're still here to tell the tale!
Also into the pot went home grown (frozen) tomatoes and leaves from the early purple sprouting broccoli (which isn't sprouting yet) along with supermarket's own organic carrots. As I was chopping these, I wondered about the feasibility of replacing them with parnips - we have lots of these to use at the allotment but no carrots.

Trousers into Scarf project.

This is the third appearance of what was once a pair of orange velvet jeans. When the elder daughter was bored of them, they were cut into a pair of loose pull-on trousers for the younger one.

They've been worn and washed and eventually made their way to the 'charity bag' pile but I liked the material too much to let them go.
I've been wondering for a while what use I could make of orange velvet, then hit on the idea of a scarf - quick, easy, a couple of seams and done, hopefully.

The longest job was taking them apart and reducing them to 4 trouser shaped pieces. I carefully undid all the seams but needn't have bothered as I then cut all the edges off while turning into neat rectangles!
I was faced with two options at this point - either short, wide wrap or long thin scarf - and went for long and thin, sowing the short ends together....

...which made a long thin sausage to feed through the sewing machine.
Amazingly, even the turning right way round went easily
and

ta dah!!

finished scarf!

This definitely counts as upcycling as it's much more attractive than the trousers ever were!

Cold cure?

I chopped up my last home-grown red cabbage for pickling this week. Cabbage layered with onions, a sprinkling of demerara sugar and covered with spiced vinegar.
It's a bit of a shame to hide the cabbage as I love the fractal-like patterns inside - ok, the same patterns are presumably there in green cabbage but not so visible.
I also love pickled cabbage on winter salads else I wouldn't be making it but while away at University my daughter and friends decided the vinegar from it made an excellent cold cure. Why it should, I have no idea - particularly as the same vinegar goes onto pickled onions and that apparently didn't have the same beneficial effects. Can cabbage really be that good for you?

Quinces

I've just put the last of the quinces in the oven to bake and I'm wishing I'd had more! They weren't home-grown but I was lucky enough to pick some up through Freegle (freecycling) earlier in Autumn. This was my first experience of them but I'd heard people say how wonderful they are.

They're certainly odd to look at - something like a deformed apple - and at first were very hard. I wasn't sure what to do with them - there was a carrier bag full so I wanted to try them in various ways.

Someone pointed me to an article with various quince recipes in the Telegraph and the first thing I tried was Slow roast pork belly - nice but a little strange with unexpected taste combinations.

I then tried an adaptation of an old recipe from Country Living - originally for honeyed quince pandowdy, stewed fruit with a sort of scone/dumpling topping, I altered it to have a low-fat scone type topping. This was certainly a better way to let the unusually exotic taste of the quinces shine out - so we've had this several times! My daughter had complained about the smell from 'that strange fruit', as it sat ripening in a bowl but I thought it was delicious - strangely mango-like rather than the apple/pear taste I'd expected.

I have, of course, made some quince tablet or paste - basically a super-stiff jam set in a small cake tin - to either try with cheese or add to pork dishes long after the fresh quinces have gone.
I'm certainly going to be looking out for more on offer next year, but meanwhile I've sown some pips in the hope of having my very own quince tree.

So far, so good

My current crochet project is advancing slowly but surely. I thought I had nearly enough of the motifs worked, so I sketched out the shape of the finished waistcoat (left front) and placed them on it - only to discover I had nothing like sufficient pieces! Back to making circles again for now - which is easier than joining up!

Giving Crochet Another Try

I've knitted (almost) all my life and assume I'm quite good at it - certainly I can knit and watch TV, even knit and read a book (providing book stays open at right page) but crochet has always been a bit of a mystery.
Still, a couple of years ago I managed, very slowly, to make my daughter a crocheted top and since then I've made a couple of scarves, so I though I'd at last have a go something larger for myself.

I'm trying to adapt a Rowan design - with long sleeves - and make a waistcoat. Apart from the bit of having to get out the instruction book to remember how to make a double crochet or a treble, things have gone quite well. I need to use the pattern a lot more than with knitting and it's not so easy to watch TV at the same time but I'm getting there.


The pattern consists of lots of medallions - 4 in all - which have gone quite well. I'm now at the stage of fastening them together, which isn't as easy. I have piles of ready made circles, a paper outline and marks of where the joining up chains should go but things get skewed every time I try to join the circles up.
I seem to need an extra pair of hands to hold things still.
Hopefully I'll have a finished garment to post here soon - fingers crossed!

Saving for winter

We seem, rather happily, to be inundated with produce this year, well, some sorts of veg - beetroot, runner beans, apples and tomatoes mainly.

The beetroot and apples are stored where-ever I can find space - in boxes, baskets, bags - whatever I can find. The beans have had to go in the freezer as I can't think of any other way to store them but I'm trying to NOT put all the tomatoes in there. I'm rather paranoid about the possibility of the electricity being cut off due to snow or high wind and everything in the freezer turning to slush.

So, I'm trying out other methods of storing them.
It's a long while since I've had enough tomatoes to make passata making seem worthwhile but I'm on my third batch this year! The first didn't keep well - one jar started to turn mouldy, so the other is being kept in the fridge (not helpful if there's a power cut).
The second batch had olive oil floated over the passata before sealing and re-heating - maybe I shouldn't have re-heated as the oil just mixed in with the tomatoes!

I then decided to 'sun'dry some tomatoes - with the help of the top oven. I sliced them up, placed on baking paper on the grill and placed them in the unlit top oven while the bottom one was in use. I've used this method on apples but I left the tomatoes till they were much drier. The plum tomatoes with thicker sides and less pips seem to have worked better than the juicy steak tomatoes. They're all very leathery now and packed into a jar. They should be covered with oil but for now I'm seeing how well they will keep without it.
Today though, I'm back to making passata. Smaller jars, no oil on top and we'll see how well this batch keeps.