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.

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.

Hoarding for Winter

After yesterday's allotment trip, today was all about finding ways to preserve the crops through winter. First and definitely the easiest is popping things in the freezer - but even the big chest freezer in the garage is starting to groan under its load. Even so,it's the best way I think to save the sweetcorn, chopped into mini cobs and blanched first. I think there's more this year than last; so far about 3 times the amount shown here and a lot more still to be picked!





Then on to the more troublesome courgettes and tomatoes. I already have some of each frozen, plus one of the courgettes was a bit too overgrown and soft, so I decided to try an old chutney recipe that I haven't made up in quite a while.
While it used up most of the spare courgettes (1 1/2lb) it didn't make much of a difference to the tomatoes (only half a pound)




 Being a small-ish quantity, I just used a big saucepan and didn't bother struggling to get the preserving pan out.It's an easier recipe than some - courgettes, tomatoes, onion, garlic (all home grown), sugar, vinegar and spices thrown in the pan and boiled.
it turns the normal murky brown of chutneys when cooked but tastes different to my usual rather sweet varieties. I just wish I'd managed to find two medium sized jars, instead of one little and one large!

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...

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.