Chutneys, Relish and Bread ...Oh My!

Om Nom Harvest Time

We found a hidden blackberry bramble in some laurel bushes, only a handful of fruit on it so far as it's well hidden away from the light.

We're going to train some of the runners out to get more of a harvest next year or look into possible relocating the whole plant. May be a bit of nightmare due to the nature of the bramble though. However this awakened a craving for blackberry and apple crumble in all of us.

So...

Blackberry and Apple Crumble


The Blackberries were picked by my sister while walking her dog down the canal paths and a bag of cooking apples were given on freecycle.

Cook apples and blackberries with a little sugar into a goo, make crumble topping, combine and cook. Nom

Due to the success of the banana method of ripening tomatoes, we had a sudden glut of them. What to do, what to do....cook them!

*giggles*

Tomato Chilli and Onion Sweet Relish

Very more-ish, we've gone through a jar already...just to test it before we leave it to mature for 2 months ;)

Chilli Chutney

This stuff has a bit of a kick to it...like a kick in the face with some chilli DM's..hehe


And a load of home made (from scratch, no machines here) bread to eat it all with.

In Garden news, the chillies are ripening nicely

Our pet ladybird (she has a damaged wing and can't fly) is doing a wonderful job of eating all the aphids :)


The hops are erm...hopping :)

We've just ordered a cheap dehydrator to help store all the harvest, and we have another batch of tomatoes ripening up with the banana method. We've amalgamated all the remaining tomatoes into one box now.

We've noticed that we have to keep the tomatoes well away from the end of the bananas to prevent mould though

A batch of chutney or relish to store up for christmas presents will be made with this lot

We're having some caterpillar trouble on the Purple Sprouting though, not sure the little plants will make it through :(

You say tomato, I say erm...salsa :D

Well, the bananas work! We've had our first handful of ripe tomatoes and turned them into a cheese, tomato and ham sarnie (with other ingredients ofc ;) ) and a salsa. More details on them later...

Here's the bag of beetroot we harvested, this goes straight to my sister as she likes it..and we don't ;)

Jalapeno update. The peppers seem to be going black, it's not an unhealthy black though so we're watching and waiting to see if it's a weird colour variation.

We've planted two more potatoes that had self chitted so we have a chance of fresh spuds for christmas dinner.

We've also planted out some mostly dead purple spouting broccoli that has been sorely neglected and left in the greenhouse. But as the quote goes, "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead"

Okay, so first ripe tomato

Om Nom Nom

The harvest whitecurrants were going to be made into a jelly, however I got distracted by a large mug of tea and before I knew it the sugar had caramelised and made a strange kind of whitecurrant toffee. I actually really like it, and there's not a lot left ;)










Salsa :D

Ingredients

5 x banana ripened tomatoes
1 x red onion grown from seed
3 x chillies grown from self harvested seed. (2 red, 1 green, all seeds included)
a dash of red wine vinegar
a glug of olive oil
a pinch of mustard powder

The end result looks quite nauseating but tastes fantastic. It's quite hot, but very tasty. Will work well with some tortilla chips tomorrow for lunch.