Clearing the freezer and coping with gluts

My huge chest freezer has reached crisis point. The ice has built up and up, and unless the baskets are replaced in exactly the correct position the lid won't close. Like much of my house it's due for a declutter.


There are two main problems - all the allotment surplus that I freeze before it goes 'off' (and then forget about), and half-used bags of shop-bought things lurking right at the bottom.

So ... I decided that last month, I would make a real effort to buy no more frozen food. We'd eat the broad beans that have been sitting in there for years. Finish up the fish in sauce that we aren't really fond of. Put together all the half-used packs of bacon, prawns, and peas - and discover there actually IS enough for a meal.


I took out tomatoes and made passata, gooseberries for chutney, plums for jam, lemons to add to marrow and rhubarb marmalade.

Things were going well but then, just as the freezer looked clear enough to defrost, the allotment went into 'glut' mode. A few days of rain, followed by a few days holiday, meant it wasn't checked for a while, and the courgettes had grown into marrows. The greenhouse tomatoes started to ripen; the outdoor ones developed blight and had to be cleared.

Blackberries and autumn raspberries were ready to pick; as were the runner and French beans. Rhubarb decided to grow again, and apples started to fall from the trees. It's time to lift onions and potatoes, and possibly think about early pumpkins.

If only allotment produce would come along at a reasonable rate, as and when needed!




It's been time for a lot of inventive recipes - fruit with every breakfast, lazy trifle made from cold custard, blackberries, and yogurt, and cranachan made with yogurt (not cream).

And with this huge pile of marrows/courgettes to use more invention was called for. Marrow seems like an odd ingredient for jam but actually works well. Combined with an equal weight of rhubarb, and lots of frozen lemon skins it makes a tasty preserve somewhere between a marmalade and a jam.








In more traditional ways of using it we've had it roasted in lemon,  added to curry, pasta sauce, omelettes, goulash, and, last and definitely worst, stuffed. I still want to try a battered, fried recipe I was given, and the courgettes keep cropping so I may get the chance.

Beans, tomatoes (even the green ones) and surplus fruit have ended up in the freezer - it's completely full again but at least it's with this year's fruit and veg. Onions are hanging from the garage ceiling; potatoes are in bags in the cupboard under the stairs. People keep talking about stocking up for Brexit - I don't need to :)

Bringing summer back to the kitchen

It's January so you can't expect the weather to be warm and sunny, but I always find it a good time, especially on a miserable rainy day, to raid the freezer and bring back the scents of summer to the kitchen.

First, my lazy version of passata. Frozen tomatoes are much easier to peel than fresh - drop them in boiling water and the skin falls off - then I just simmer them for a while till they're cooked and the consistency looks right. At this point, a more enthusiastic person might sieve the pips out. I don't mind them in soup or pasta sauces, so I don't bother with the fuss. I just pour the gloop into jars and boil to seal. The last bit always used to worry me - boiling a glass jar seems such a wrong thing to do - but, so far, I haven't had any accidents.




Then, a few days later, spurred on by the sight of stored apples rotting in their boxes, I decided to make jam. It's probably possible to use just apples but that doesn't seem a very exciting spread for toast or whatever, so I'd normally add some blackberries out of the freezer - this time, for a bit of variety, I used raspberries. I use roughly 2lbs apples to 1lb of other fruit, which I find works well. The jam tastes of the berries, but doesn't contain anything like the amount of seeds as jam made solely from them. It's more culinary laziness really.


We still have quite a few home-grown apples remaining, so I need to find some way of using them  - not cakes or puddings but maybe in casseroles with pork or sausages.

Preserving time again

'In progress' chutney

Autumn's always the time of year for making chutneys and jams on a massive scale. Although sound pumpkins and apples keep easily enough, there are always damaged ones thatneed to be processed in some way, so ... out with the preserving pan - first to rescue a couple of butternut squash by making chutney, then to turn some damaged apples, with the help of blackberries from the freezer, into jam.

The finished chutney

Oops ... back in October ...

Well, here's an embarrassment - a blog post written in October, but never posted! The jam's probably been eaten by now, and the tomatoes ripened before I made any chutney!












We've had a few days of clearing out things at the allotment - picking apples before they all fall, and collecting tomatoes before cold weather and/or blight takes the plants.

I intend making chutney with the tomatoes but started preserve-making with the apples as some were damaged by insects and birds.

Apples on their own don't make very appealing jam so I hunted out blackberries and raspberries from the freezer to add to them. I always have too many berries to use fresh and the leftovers can end up lost at the bottom of the freezer ... sometimes for years! I could, of course, make plain blackberry or raspberry jam but then I'd either have to put up with the masses of pips, or sieve the pulp.

So not only does mixing apples and berries give a fantastic colour to what would otherwise be a bland-looking jam, but it's also comparatively low in pips unlike jams made solely with berries.

Autumnal Hues on a Sunny Sunday Afternoon

After a dismal start to the day, with proper autumnal rain lashing at the windows, 

the sun appeared during the afternoon giving me time to potter around in the garden

Leaves have started to turn and drift down from the trees

but for now 

from Michaelmas daisies, through the leaves of blueberry shrubs and red salad-bowl lettuce,

 kaffir lilies and fuchsias, to ripening apples

the predominant colour in the garden ranges through red to purple

Using up pumpkins and apples

Last week turned out to be a busy one making jam and chutney. First I discovered the end of the pumpkin turning frankly quite disgusting, so I salvaged what was left and made chutney.

 It's another of those 'adapted' recipes that I came up with a few years ago when I had a glut of gooseberries, and then altered slightly to make use of pumpkin instead. It's spicy (ginger and chillis) but fruity (orange juice), and my favourite even though it never turns out exactly as the previous batch.

 I still didn't use the whole pumpkin up but had a chunk, about 8oz, left over, enough for goulash.

Then the apples - I thought all our home-grown apples had been used up, but then we needed a cardboard box and checked what was in the one in the back porch ....and found some apples! Some were only fit for throwing straight in the compost bin, some were still fine to keep a little while but most were best used straight away.
I also have too many frozen raspberries, so I combined them, about 50:50. It's a lazy way of getting round the 'pip' problem of raspberries. I prefer jam made solely from raspberries to be sieved, but it's so time consuming. This way, with raspberries  making up only half the fruit, I don't bother.

I still have some left-over apples, but for last autumn's crop they don't look too bad and will soon be used in apple sauce or as stewed topping for breakfast cereals.

Back to jam-making ..... and blogging

 I recently realised I'd let this blog run down rather, though to be honest I haven't been doing much in the way of crafty or culinary things - well, not interesting things. Last week though I was somewhat forced into them after clearing one of the garden apple trees of fruit. Most of it was damaged in some way - wasps or birds nibbling mainly - and, as I can never bear to let things go to waste, it had to be used straight away.

 You can see the pecked at bits, or marks where insects have burrowed inside, but though it doesn't look like very attractive fruit most of it was only partly damaged and most of each apple save-able.
 Anyway, I peeled and chopped and had about 2 1/2lbs which I boiled up, then added the same weight of blackberries from the freezer (some of which were last years!) to make a lovely dark jam.

 Having made a start, maybe I'll be back in the swing of things - and back blogging about it!

Using things up in the kitchen ....

 It's been a busy week of trying to use old veg that's been hanging round the kitchen and in the freezer since autumn.
 Last year's pumpkins are no longer keeping well, but starting to rot. Last week I made pumpkin marmalade, this week some chutney.

 Then I moved on to using some rather soft apples up and clearing some of the blackberries out of the freezer - seven jars of lovely 'black' jam.

Then, having picked some lovely early salad leaves from the garden, I decided I really should use up the stored blue radish.






This is a lot larger than little round red radish from the shop, but tastes more or less the same - a little hotter yet, having been stored since December, not as crisp. It's lovely to be able to start and put together a 'free lunch' again though :)

More preserving - apple and blackberry jam

 Last week was all about using up green tomatoes, this week I'm finding a use for all the tiny apples from our tree.

 With high winds threatened for Wednesday, we decided it was best to pick apples before they fell down. Some are good enough to store but some are too small and damaged, so I cleaned these up, then popped all the good bits including skins and cores into a pan. 

After cooking them till soft, I sieved them to make a purée to which I added blackberries from the freezer.

 It looks a bit like fruit cake mix at this stage but soon turns dark purple through and through. 

A quick boil, the addition of sugar, and more boiling and, ta da, jam!