In The Kitchen

Last year was a super busy year for us with very few weekends at home.  Which meant that our veg patch got completely lost amongst the weeds. We were forced to stay home for a couple of weeks when we got Covid for the first time.  And we were not very sick at all, just fatigued and contagious and at home.  Every cloud as they say.   After a couple of days feeling miserable and sorry for ourselves (I know, pathetic right), we decided we'd make the most of our time and get out into the veg patch.  We weeded and hoed and dug and sat a lot in between.    Over the course of two weeks, we managed to plant tomatoes, peas (snow peas and regular), beetroot, lettuce (which bolted in no time at all), zucchinis, pumpkins, beans (which promptly got eaten by something), broad beans and capsicums.  Needless to say, we felt very satisfied when we had neat rows of vegetable seedlings where there had been knee high weeds.  We also managed to give the fruit trees a good mulch and feed and put in some alyssum to attract the pollinators.  

Normally we'd share a lot of our produce by leaving it at Mum's for my lovely family to pick up.  That didn't quite work out this year so I've had more produce to preserve than usual.  Of course we stuffed ourselves silly with the fresh fruit; apricots (all four of them), endless nectarines, peaches, three types of plums (Santa Rosa, satsuma and president), gooseberries, cherries, mulberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. And loquats which we're particularly pleased with because we grew the tree from a seed from our tree in Greenmount.  

But I digress, we had a lot of produce to preserve.  I turned nectarines into chutney and jam, made some cakes which had pureed nectarine in the batter and still managed to give some away.   We had spare peaches which I dried - they turned out surprisingly well, sweet and tasty.  I also dried quite a lot of tomatoes and bottled some as well.  Peas and beans got frozen.  Although I ate most of the regular peas straight off the vine.  I love fresh peas.  

Most of the tomatoes are Roma.  To preserve them I just washed and chopped them, stuffed them into Vacola jars, added some water, a little salt and lemon juice.

  

 

 

I didn't take photos of the jars being stuffed with tomatoes.  But I did take a photo of the box of clips that are used to hold the lids onto the jars and of the preserver.  I mean seriously, I've got to plan these things a little better, I think. It wasn't until I sat down, feeling satisfied that the tomatoes were heating up in the preserver, that I thought that a photo of the processing would be good for this blog.  Sheesh.

  

This is the jars all lined up on our kitchen bench after spending 90 minutes in the preserver.  Those jars are all now neatly lined up in our hall cupboard (which masquerades as a pantry because it's the coolest cupboard in the house), waiting for winter when they'll get turned into spag bog or something else equally yummy. 

Drying tomatoes is a lot less work than bottling them.   The tomatoes simply get washed, halved and then laid out on the drying trays.  Then the temperature is set to 55 degrees and they're left for many, many hours.  Well, those that don't get taste tested along the way that is. 

Drying the tomatoes really intensifies the flavour. Once they were dried, we divvied them up into containers and put them in the freezer to increase their longevity.  When we're ready to use them, I'll thaw them out and we'll just use them straight away or I might put some in oil with herbs.  We'll see. 

We only had a few peaches to dry but it was well worth the effort. I just put them in with the tomatoes. On a separate tray of course. 

Of course, no blog about produce would be complete without showing off some of that produce.     This year we grew a variety of capsicum called Candy Stripe. It's easy to see how it got its' name.

We had plenty of loquats, blueberries and managed to get a wee bit of lettuce.

Oodles of snow peas, way more than we can eat but they freeze well.  We're still picking zuchinies;  green, yellow and the cream and green almost stripey ones. 

Our raspberries have done really well this year.  Nothing to do with us I'm sure.  Just good luck. We've treated them the same way this year as we always do. But we've had bowls of raspberries to eat. Yum.

We've just started picking our figs.   So far we've been eating them as we pick.  If we manage to beat the birds to the figs in the bottom paddock, we'll soon have a glut.  Fig jam might be in order methinks. Or maybe Fig Bakewell Tart.  Or dried figs.  Figgy pudding (does that actually have fresh figs in it).  The possibilities are endless.