Rainy Monday

Yesterday was a really wet, generally horrible autumnal day - and so I got busy in the kitchen.

First, my lazy passata which is basically skinned tomatoes,cooked for a while, then when I think everything looks thick enough, pop it in jars, and re-boil them to seal.

Next task - freezing runner beans. These were so big and tough that a lot of them weren't fit to keep, but they did have beans inside which I've kept.

They look quite pretty when raw....





but boiling them turns the pink-shelled beans grey so I popped them out of their skins.

On to dinner - an almost free goulash-style meal using our allotment-grown squash and red pepper, onions, mixed batch of cannelini and borlotti beans, tomatoes and potatoes.

I used a small amount of smoked paprika, instead of my normal home-grown chilli which can be too hot, a small piece of pork from the Sunday roast, some left-over breadcrumbs and cheese for topping - so very nearly a 'free' dinner.








And, last thing before settling down with my knitting, setting up cucumber and onion to soak in brine overnight before pickling tomorrow.

Use it or lose it!

  Two attempts, this week, at trying to make something out of 'useless' food;


First a couple of whopper cucumbers found lurking at the back of the greenhouse under all the foliage. Both green cucumbers had hard knobbly skins and didn't look at all pleasant to add to salad or sandwiches. I've already made a stash of marmalade this year with surplus cucumbers, and experimented with piccalilli, so wanted to try something else and settled on 'bread and butter pickle'.

Basically, cucumber and onion are salted for a couple of hours,then drained and added to hot vinegar spiced with mustard seeds, fennel seeds and turmeric - the latter gives it a rather odd yellow colour that I'm not sure if I'm fond of.




Now it has to sit in the fridge for a while to let the vegetables 'pickle', so I can't test it for a week or so.

Meanwhile.... something sweeter. A couple of days ago I made curry which required coconut milk, and not having the tinned version to hand I made some by steeping dessicated coconut in boiling water. Having used the water as 'milk' I was then left with the remains of the coconut. it isn't really all that flavoursome by this point by I've tried using it in cakes before and it's ok. This time I made muffins  - with an extra little bit of 'use it or lose it' involved. In the baking cupboard, I found glace cherries (probably from last year's Christmas cake) with a 'best before' date of end of September. Phew! Just in time!

Using up some of the glut

It's been another good week at the allotment -which means far too many cucumbers again.

Time to get out the preserving pan!

First my standard cucumber preserve - jam, or marmalade, maybe, as it's heavily flavoured

with lemon bits and pieces hoarded in the freezer after using the juice or zest (I hate to throw anything away!)

 

That didn't use up enough of the cucumbers though, so I decided to try something new, that would also help me use up other bits and pieces from the allotment - piccalilli.

This didn't go according to plan though...

I got all the veg prepared and ready; small onions not big enough for anything else, runner beans (I already seem to have a freezer-full), cucumber of course, some surplus courgette and a tiny cauliflower barely bigger than a piece of sprouting broccoli.



 All the veg has to soak in brine for 24 hours.....so while it did that, I popped to the shop to get some turmeric, a necessary ingredient for the next bit.




When the time was up, I drained the veg and started making the mustardy sauce - at which point I discovered there wasn't enough mustard powder in the cupboard!!!
Off to the shop again, only to find they didn't sell mustard powder - all I could buy was the ready-made paste. To hopefully get round this, I made the sauce with the full amount of turmeric and about half the mustard, and when it was cooked added a couple of teaspoons of the mustard paste. I've no idea whether this will work, only tasting will tell.

For now, it looks ok though there does seem to be a lot of sauce to comparatively few vegetables. Now it needs to stand for three weeks before the great taste test.....

Post-holiday glut

I've only been away for a few days, but things carried on growing and growing for those few days so I found a surplus of tomatoes and cucumbers waiting for me.


I often deal with tomatoes by just throwing them in the freezer and hoping I find time to do something with them later, but as the freezer is full to over-flowing, I decided to plunge straight in and make my 'lazy passata'. It's lazy because I don't bother to sieve it all - just skin the tomatoes, chop them up and cook them before bottling. It takes a lot less time!

Cucumbers are trickier to deal with - no popping them in the freezer!
As I already have a stock-pile of frozen lemon pieces (left from recipes which require only juice or zest), I went for my unusual cucumber and lemon jam/marmalade. Basically the cucumbers stretch the lemons and add bulk to the preserve so it's a good way to use them.

After boiling, an over-night soak is best to soften up the lemon peel - and this time, due to other things happening, it ended up with 2 nights soaking!








The finished preserve tastes rather sharp and marmalade-like, and looks a far better colour than in this pic.

Courgette chutney

 I've got a surplus of courgettes and cucumbers at the moment so decided to adapt my favourite chutney recipe to make use of 3 lbs of them. 

 At first, it didn't look too appealing as the courgette didn't mash down in the way pumpkin does..

but with the addition of demerara sugar, it turned into a proper gungy brown chutney colour.

From tasting the spillages while bottling, it doesn't taste the same - the courgettes have remained chunkier and a the moment their taste is distinctive through the vinegar and spices. With time though, this should mellow. Fingers crossed!

A Variety of things to make with Too Many Cucumbers

 We've had a bit of a a cucumber glut recently - quite a few 'normal' long ones but lots of round crystal lemon types - and all at the point where the weather has dropped cooler and no one wants cucumber salads any more.





It was time to look for more ways to use them up!

I started with my slightly bizarre standby of cucumber jam


This always sounds odder than it tastes as once cooked up the cucumber doesn't taste much and the flavour of the lemons is far stronger

Then cucumber chutney tweeking my normal pumpkin recipe - cucumber boils down more than pumpkin and I didn't end up with as much chutney for my efforts...but at least the number of cucumbers in the bottom of the fridge was going down.









In the end, I got out the recipe books and cooked them!
This is one of a variety of recipes for braised cucumber. As I was using the round crystal lemon cucumbers I cut them into wedges and left the seeds in. They're then left to stand in a mix of salt, sugar and lemon juice for 30 mins or so, drained, covered with breadcrumbs and baked.
I'd half expected them to turn soggy when cooked but they didn't, turning surprisingly crisp. They didn't taste of cucumber either but of something far more unusual. I'm not sure I'd try it again though - if there's a glut next year, I'll go for salsas and more pickles instead.

Cucumber jam

This week's glut is.....cucumbers! 

The weather's turned cooler, no one wants to eat salad and I can hardly freeze them, so it's back to my weird jam making.

Having tried this recipe before I don't think cucumber jam (or marmalade) is so very odd.

The cucumber just gives bulk and picks up the flavour of whatever is added, in this case lemons.

It looks quite marmalade-like but I don't think I was generous enough with the lemons this time as the flavour isn't very strong - in future I'll add more.

Still, it's ok and has saved the surplus from being wasted.

More weird - and not so weird - preserving.

Our first frost of the year this week so had to clear lots of things at the allotment - too many crystal lemon cucumbers and lots of tiny, tiny green cherry tomatoes - plus we picked up some windfall apples through Freecycle which won't keep for long so really need to be used - so it was time for the jam pan to come out again!

Having had an unexpected success with courgette jam, I thought I'd try the same recipe with cucumber. Basically 2lb peeled, chopped cucumber simmered with 3 lemons and enough water to cover.


When the cucumber's softened, squash with the potato masher. Leave to cool, chop the lemons into thin strips, then measure the pulp. Add 1lb sugar to pint of pulp and either boil to setting point straight away or leave overnight to soak first. The lemon is definitely softer if left overnight.

It looks and tastes like a lemon marmalade - and the first batch was such a success, I'm now onto a second (simmering right now!)






The tomatoes were a different problem - the normal sized ones went into chutney with some of the apples








but any chutney made with the tiny cherry ones would have been full of skins so I decided to try Green Tomato Sauce - a strange thing of my own invention but really a sieved chutney.




It doesn't look very appetising - I used granulated sugar instead of demerara because my sugar stocks were getting low but obviously the reason so many chutney recipes call for demerara sugar is to improve the colour and appearance. It contains a fair amount of chillies and I'm thinking of using it as a last minute addition to curries. It's not been tested yet though.







Last but not least, the most normal thing this week - apple and blackberry jam!

jam again and chutney

turned the last of the rhubarb into jam with ginger and some candied orange peel.
having a glut of cucumber at the moment so have boiled some up with tomatoes to make chutney - think I may have over-done the chillies a bit though, it is very hot.
have made apple,lemon and ginger marmalade with windfall apples before they rot.