Baby turnip, Romano pepper and continental onion salad recipe. With a homemade walnut vinegar dressing.

Posted in Preserving, Vegetables and Sides, Vegetarian | 1 comment

Baby turnip, Romano pepper and continental onion salad recipe. With a homemade walnut vinegar dressing.

  Danny and I spent all day yesterday developing a tasty slow cooked spare rib recipe. I reckon that we eventually pulled it off as the dish was guzzled very fast and everything was almost licked clean. You can find our spare rib recipe here. I wanted to serve the ribs with rice and a crisp salad. Finely sliced Oasis baby turnips were top of my list to try. I teamed two turnips with a couple of continental spring onions and a slim Romano pepper. The turnips were sweet and spicy – rather like a more succulent radish. The dressing was a...

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Drying your own herbs

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Drying your own herbs

  The cottage is filled with the sweet aroma of coriander/cilantro. Later there will be wafts of mint, oregano, marjoram, lemon balm and sage. Tomorrow it will be garlic. It has suddenly got much colder here but there are still herbs to harvest to add to hearty winter dishes and give us a hint of summer again. Needless to say I’m using the dehydrator to do this. It makes quick work of the drying process which is good as J.P. gave me a sack full of coriander. We will return half of the dried coriander to them. A good swap in my book. We...

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Pine needle vinegar update on the making stage

Posted in Fun, Preserving, Save Money | 6 comments

Pine needle vinegar update on the making stage

  I dragged in the thoughtful gift from Anne Mary’s Caledonian pine tree and started to pull off the needles. They came off reasonably easily but they had a little brown husk on the ends that attached to the branch. As far as I could remember Robin Harford’s pine needles were green from tip to tail. So I shot upstairs to the laptop and examined his photos carefully. Not a dot of brown husk anywhere. The Sherlock Holmes in me detected that he’d probably cut the pine needles off the branch with scissors. I eventually unearthed our...

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Homemade pine needle vinegar

Posted in Hedgerow food, Preserving, Sauces Gravy Dressings | 12 comments

Homemade pine needle vinegar

  It was Danny’s turn to buy the Balsamic vinegar last weekend. Someone had put an expensive bottle of Balsamic beside the cheap ones in Tesco and he ended up paying five times more than he could have. The resulting shriek got me thinking about Balsamic vinegar in general. The price and quality of Balsamic vinegar can vary enormously. We have a very expensive bottle that we use occasionally for dipping or salads and generally have a ‘cheap’ bottle that we use for cooking. But cheap Balsamic vinegar is still much more expensive than...

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Make your own rosehip tea

Posted in Hedgerow food, Preserving, Save Money | 11 comments

Make your own rosehip tea

  “Those two rose bushes beside the back door are totally out of control and need cutting back.” Danny remarked back in June. I couldn’t oblige as I was planning to make tea. The bushes got more and more flamboyant until they were given a harvesting haircut at the weekend. There are lots of roses growing in the cottage garden so we have a profusion of hips for preserving in the Autumn. I usually make rosehip and apple jelly and sometimes rosehip syrup but this year I’d discovered the huge benefits of drinking rosehip tea. This would...

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First tentative steps with hot water bath processing

Posted in Preserving | 19 comments

First tentative steps with hot water bath processing

  I woke up a few nights ago and realised that we had a water bath for processing our garden bounty hanging in the Bee Shed. This is a vast laundry pan with a double base. I have been boning up on hot water bath canning/bottling. I just wanted to process fruit and tomatoes for the winter. Other vegetables are being pickled, frozen or will be when the Food Dehydrator eventually arrives from Germany. Danny was suspicious. “If you put glass jars with lids on into boiling water they will explode. And you will break your precious Kilner...

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Still laid up but I’ve been bottling foraged fruit

Posted in Cottage tales, Hedgerow food, Preserving | 42 comments

Still laid up but I’ve been bottling foraged fruit

I’m getting to the end of my third week being in bed. Finally last week my doctor discovered that I have a problem with my kidneys. I was beginning to wonder whether I’d just fade away like one of Dicken’s heroines. So now we are waiting for more test results. Meanwhile I languish in the big spare room bed feeling lousy. I get up for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I’ve been out on two mini foraging trips to harvest wild plums and have bottled (canned) six kilos to eat in the winter months. I’ve also been harvesting the chubby...

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Walnut vinegar recipe

Posted in Hedgerow food, Preserving | 3 comments

Walnut vinegar recipe

Last year I was a bit late picking walnuts for The Grand Pickled Walnut Challenge. Not wanting to waste the nuts that were clearly far too hard to pickle, I flexed my muscles and cut a few in half. I added these to some white wine vinegar, popped the experiment onto a shelf in the barn and forgot all about it. About a month ago I was searching the shelves for empty vodka and gin bottles to make raspberry liqueur. My hand slipped and the bottle of walnut vinegar smashed on the ground. I managed to wipe a drop onto my forefinger as the vinegar...

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