Raspberry Vodka

After a fortnight of soaking raspberries and sugar in vodka, it's time for straining and decanting back into the original bottle.

There was just a little too much to fit, so I had to sample some - and very nice it was. The colour's gorgeous too. It's definitely more of a success than my rhubarb gin which smells strangely of olive oil.

I just wish I'd thought to steam off the original labels!

When life gives you raspberries ...

 They say 'when life gives you lemons, make gin and tonic'. Well, life (or the allotment) is right now giving me raspberries - far too many of them.

Some have gone into the freezer to turn into jam at a later date but this autumn's crop has been so bounteous that I'd thought I'd experiment with some of it.


So, raspberry vodka.









4 ounces raspberries, the same of sugar and not quite the whole of a 35cl bottle of vodka - letting it sit, shake frequently, and wait for two weeks.
I've made blackberry vodka before, which was lovely, and rhubarb gin which was less so and needed interesting mixers. Hopefully this will fall into the 'lovely' category.
Fingers crossed for two weeks

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.

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.

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.

Jam again!

 Another day, another unusual batch of jam...

....this time rhubarb with raspberries and redcurrants.

Usually my spare rhubarb goes into a marmalade-style conserve with oranges or lemons

but as I have raspberries and redcurrants in abundance, and last week's experiment adding them to gooseberries worked so well, I decided to try mixing them with it instead.

I could find recipes for rhubarb with strawberries so decided to loosely follow one of them - putting fruit and sugar in the jam pan and leaving to stand over night till the juices run, and boiling it up the next day.

 It's a very pretty pink while boiling, but rather 'scummy' despite my best efforts at straining it off and very 'seedy'. Sampling it while cleaning up, as you do, it tastes ok but next time I'll make the effort to sieve the raspberries and currants.

Green and red don't always make brown

 It's soft fruit season again so time to re-stock the jam cupboard. We have lots of raspberries and redcurrants ripening on the allotment and in the garden ....but... I don't like too many pips in my jam... and I don't like having to sieve it all.






So when I realised my parents' gooseberries were ready to pick, I helped myself to some. I didn't have quite enough raspberries picked so used some redcurrants with them - I always have spare redcurrants!




The recipe I have for gooseberry and raspberry jam suggest boiling all the fruit and then sieving it all but (see above) I don't like sieving! I've never found gooseberries too bitty in marmalade or chutney, so I thought I'd cook and sieve just the red fruit.






I collected the juice and started cooking the gooseberries in it while I got on with sieving.

 At this point I remembered that when mixing paint red and green usually make brown, so started to worry what colour the jam would turn out....

Fortunately, it's a rather lovely shade of pink. It probably won't taste as 'raspberry' as plain raspberry jam but after months of only marmalades it makes a pleasant change.

Messy day in the kitchen..

Today's been a damp miserable sort of day so I raided the freezer and got out some of last year's soft fruit for jam-making - a mix of blackberries, raspberries and redcurrants. At this point I got a bit carried away and got too much out. I should have realised this when, after boiling up and sieving, the pulp measured 7 pints.

Now, my jam-pan is quite large but as the pulp and sugar boiled together, I heard a whoosh sound followed by the splutter that comes as liquid dribbles on to the gas flames - the jam was over-flowing the pan!!

I had to let everything cool down so I could mop the hot pulp up - from the sides of the pan, the top of the cooker, drips down the front of cupboards and oddly some on my feet. 

Then I started again, heating it a little more cautiously and watching it like a hawk.

End result - 9 jars of gleaming mixed berry jam! 

Next time I'll make a smaller quantity. I certainly didn't save time or effort by making so much at once.

Summer jam (and leather) on a dismal day

We've had some really damp dismal weather recently so it seemed that the best thing to do was get in the kitchen and make some summery-scented jam. It's also helpful that this involves clearing things out of the almost full freezer.






This time I went for a mix of raspberries and redcurrants .....





...with all the seeds sieved out....

At this point I put some purée aside for fruit leather. This is my second attempt and this time I spread it thinner to cover a baking sheet.

I'm not sure that it worked any better this way. Most of it dried quite quickly but being very thin, it was difficult to remove from the paper and broke into bits.

To the rest of the purée, I added 3/4 pound of red gooseberries (quite ancient ones from the depths of the freezer) and made into jam.

Rainy day jam

Another wet and windy summer day! Not worth going out to garden or walk or anything, so making the most of a useless day by jamming with really old frozen fruit - a mix of redcurrants, raspberries and blackberries. It also keeps the house warm and smelling of raspberries :)

 I think though that in my efforts to clear out the freezer, I may have over filled the jam pan!

This is the nearest I've ever come to having boiling jam dripping all over the cooker!

 At the end of the day - seven jars of dark, pip-free jam.