Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness? We've had a couple of early morning mists, so far, but they burnt off very quickly once the sun came up. Mellow fruitfulness? More like aggressive ripening and rotting to be honest! We are currently in the middle of a burst of preserving such as I don't remember having to cope with before.
The peaches have been ripening and plopping off the tree for a while now - anything that hits the ground is immediately pounced on by ants and wasps and bees and their friends and relations. What is still on the tree has a slight miasma of dark mould from the aphids that lived on the leaves during the summer, so eating from the tree is not entirely pleasant and the fruit still on the tree is only partially ripe. That didn't stop me yesterday and I picked and peeled some two kilos giving me enough for 4 and a half pots of white peach and rum jam - very tasty!
So that's the jar on the right. On the left is a slightly more sinister jar of spiced fig sauce, which is good with meat dishes. That was the result of a raiding party on the fig tree at the bottom of the garden that has declared war on me. We had a first crop of figs in June - they were tasty, particularly baked with sweet mincemeat and a bit of honey. The second crop has gone slightly mad, with exploding figs everywhere. The blackbirds that normally get half the fruit can't keep up. The chickens are eating what they can and feeling the effects too I think. The fig sauce was an attempt to cope and also to deal with some of the many, many chillies we are also getting from the Cayenne chilli plants (the jalapeños aren't ripe yet).
While the peach jam was gently simmering away, I picked a further kilo and a half of figs, chopped them up and made another four jars of fig jam (no surprising additives in that). They are a nice ruby colour. The major jamming session will be during the week when I attack the quince problem. Normally our tree has about a dozen fruit - enough for a liqueur and perhaps 10 jars of jelly. This year we stopped counting at 50. They are turning quickly now, so I need to get moving and preserving. I am also trying new recipies for other things to do with quince - watch this space.
But it's not all jams and jellies, because everything else is going nuts too! During the week i froze a dozen sweetcorn, and once this blog is done, I have this lot to work through.
To be clear, that is a dozen tomatoes, three courgettes, 2 cristophines and 31 cayenne chillies, from a half hour foray of picking. There is going to be a very big pot of hot tomato and courgette gunge on the go shortly. The rest of the chillies will be frozen for later.
One of the cristophines was eaten last night as an accompaniment to fish kebabs. I split it into quarters, boiled it, then peeled it (the skin isn't edible and has an annoying latex when raw), chopped it up and sautéed it with a home grown red onion, before adding cream to be glutton-ish. Delicious! I will do a similar thing with two more tomorrow, but adding in lardons to make a main meal.
But now I can hear the rumbling of yet another thunderstorm, so I need to go and round up a couple of quince for tonight's pork and quince tagine - I'll let you know how that goes.
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