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.

Passata and Pickles

I seem to be in non-stop preserving mode at the moment. If there's a fruit or vegetable that can be stored by turning into jam, chutney, pickles or whatever, I'm doing it.
I've already pickled our home grown onions, turned cucumbers into bread and butter pickle, made chutney with pumpkins and jam with apples and blackberries.


This weekend I've turned my eye to the stock-pile of frozen tomatoes, and cleared some space in the freezer by making passata. Mine's a rather lazy version,with no sieving required! I pour boiling water over the still-frozen tomatoes so I can easily slip the skins off, then boil them for half an hour or so till the fruit 'collapses' - and that's basically it. Once the jars are sealed, I've found this to keep almost indefinitely, but over winter, I'll use it in soups, added to pasta sauces, or poured over enchilladas.




Next I decided to tackle the courgette glut that's filling my fridge vegetable compartment. It's possible to freeze them but they always seem so limp and damp afterwards, no matter how they're cooked, but a couple of years ago I tried using them instead of cucumber in bread and butter pickles, and the experiment paid off. I think they might actually keep longer, which is good as I already have two jars of cucumber pickle to eat!
So, an hour or so salting, some hot vinegar poured over, and that's another batch of preserving done ...

Passata, Minestrone and Buttons

 On a damp dreary day it's nice to have something bubbling away in the kitchen so today seemed like a good day to clear out all the tiny cherry tomatoes and pop them in a pan. We've been picking ripe ones from the allotment greenhouse until this week, and as it's not really salad weather supply has outstripped demand. There's really too high a percentage of skins and seeds for my normal 'lazy' passata, so today's version had to be sieved.
Part way through cooking, and loving the tomatoey aromas, I decided to turn half into minestrone for lunch.An excellent plan for a miserable day.

 After lunch I settled to a quiet afternoon of sorting out buttons. I'm at the point in my knitting where I need to decide how many buttonholes to make  - and as I have lots of buttons, I wanted to find some out of the stash rather than buy more. The orangey-brown ones, centre front, would have been fine but there wasn't enough of them. In fact I couldn't find 7 or 8 matching, or even suitable to mix, buttons anywhere. So.... after all the playing and sorting, I've decided to move some from a denim shirt and replace those with blue buttons. Not the simplest solution but at least I won't be acquiring more!

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.

Another week, another batch of preserves

The freezer is getting very close to full so I'm trying to preserve at least of the fruit and veg in other ways,so it's time to get the preserving pan out again.
First I made a couple more jars of my 'lazy passata' - with skinned but not sieved tomatoes. Then on to the jam. This was limited by the amount of sugar I had left - so I weighed that first,then worked out how much fruit I could use up. Luckily that was more than the amount of blackberries I was trying to avoid freezing, so I added some apples (picked to reduce the weight on spindly branches) and even a bag of mixed raspberries, blackcurrant and blueberries from the depths of the freezer. The result? four jars of dark, dark jam and a little more breathing space in the freezer .....for now...

Tomato day

 Despite the weather turning colder, I've a glut of tomatoes from the allotment - and no space in the freezer for them so I got out the saucepans to use them up - well some of them.

First - passata. I've been trying to avoid the fiddly sieving and leaving the pips in with most of this year's jarred tomatoes but I had lots of little cherry types that were best sieved to remove skins as well.

 Second - lunch. Minestrone with turnips, white beans and spinach.

 Last but not least, a huge batch of green tomato chutney.

The day's jars all lined up.

Lunch from the Lottie #5

'green salad' - ie chopped cabbage, rocket, baby lettuce, american land cress and cucumber - with tiny red and yellow tomatoes

'minestrone' with fresh parsnips and carrots and last year's broad beans and tomatoes from the freezer

chilli with 3 beans - french, broad and white. Used up lots of small wrinkled tomatoes, a variety of peppers and chillies, and added some fizzy ,turning to alcohol, homemade passata to thicken.