Pumpkin lantern

Halloween today and a steady stream of trick or treaters came to our door. We put the pumpkin lantern on our garage roof. It got noticed! Tomorrow I will remove it, break it up and feed it to the hens and goats. Waste nothing!

Pumpkin and apple jam

Making jam was a useful way to use up the mountain of pumpkin flesh and a batch of apples from our garden in London ensured we had a supply of pectin to set it (though the jam emerged as a soft set).

Peel, core and chop the apples and put into a preserving pan with the same weight of chopped pumpkin flesh. Add a bit of water to cover the bottom of the pan. Bring to the boil and then simmer until the fruit is soft. Add sugar - the same weight as the total of pumpkin and apple. Bring back to the boil and keep on a rolling boil until the setting point is reached (put a dollop onto a plate, let it cool and check to see if it has set). Then put into hot, sterilized jars.



Don't waste the apple peel and cores - boil them up to make a jelly.

Acorns

Acorns - at this time of year there are tonnes of them (excluding last year when the rotten weather ensured there was little of anything). The oak is one of our most well known trees, not just here but throughout Europe and North America. Despite that, the abundant crop of acorns is rarely used as a food source. There was a time, hundreds of years ago, when acorns were fed to pigs to fatten them up in the autumn, though generally, pigs were released into woodland to feed on a variety of nuts, fruit and roots. We don't have any pigs but we have goats so I fed them a handful of acorns this morning. Seconds later they spat them out.

So, having failed to use them as a feed for livestock, my next aim is to use acorns in cooking. There aren't many recipes about but in the past I have had a go at making acorn flour to use in bread baking. I'll give that a go again but I am on the outlook for other acorn recipes. Any suggestions?

A return visit from the fox

We lost 2 of our ducks to foxes earlier this year. We therefore decided to hatch some of our duck eggs. The result was 5 ducklings, all of which grew rapidly into adulthood. More recently they started laying. Alas, they had also stopped used the duckhouse at night. No matter what we did, they would not go inside. So we accepted that they would be outdoors through the night, leaving them vulnerable to foxes. What surprised me was that there were no fox incidents for nearly two months. Unfortunately, that ended on Friday morning. Two of the ducks hatched this year were nowhere to be seen. There were no feathers or body parts left behind as evidence of the fox's activities but there can be no other explanation for the ducks' disappearance. So, we are going to hatch more eggs. They go into the incubator tonight.

Pumpkin pies and soup at the Allotment Cafe

On Sunday we will be running our monthly Allotment Cafe at Marley Hill Community Centre and with Halloween coming up, pumpkins will be featuring on the menu. We will be serving up pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie as well as our usual Tamworth pork burgers, full cooked breakfast (which includes our Tamworth bacon and our free range eggs) and sandwiches. And today I found a local baker who is bringing along her Halloween cakes, sweets and chocolate apples.


(Pumpkin soup)


(pumpkin pie)

The pies and soup above were made from one pumpkin which weighed 22kg. We have used only a small amount of the pumpkin flesh and we still have another three pumpkins of a similar size to use up. I suspect we will be having lots of pumpkin curries, cakes, soups, pies and just about anything else you can think of over the coming weeks and months!

Pickling tomatoes

Lots of tomatoes to preserve. Pickling them in a brine and vinegar solution is one way to ensure they are preserved.

How to make elderberry jelly

Lots of elderberries and another bucket of them picked yesterday. So, making elderberry jelly (using some of our windfal apples as the pectin source) was a logical way to use them up. We will also be making wine and cordial from the berries as well.