Quince Jelly

The tomatoes really are coming on quicker than we can manage now. You can take off a dozen new fruits every day, and still have another dozen to do the next day. We’ve run out of things we can make with them.

So this weekend we’ve been picking and eating them, mainly in sandwiches, and turning our attention sweeter pleasures.

There’s a quince tree in the front garden, which has been ripe for picking for almost a month. Quince is a funny fruit. It’s not attractive, it grows itself around the branches of its tree, its sticky, and it doesn’t smell too good. You also don’t seem to be able to buy them in the shops, so you really do need to have your own bush, or know someone who has one to get your hands on some. All that aside, it does make a very sweet jelly that’s a wonderful pinky red in the jar.

Quince in the pan

We took a little over 2kg from the tree, washed and halved them, and then boiled them in three pints of water for an hour and a half. By then, they were mushy and soft, the pips had come out and the skins had rolled themselves off. We scooped them from the jam pan into a muslin pouch, stretched out over a tripod stand and left to drip out into a mixing bowl until the next morning.

That gave us about three pints of syrup - almost the same as the amount of water we put onto the fruit, and added a pound of jam sugar for each pint. Putting it back in the pan, we boiled it up until the sugar had all dissolved, then added the juice of a lemon and kept up the heat until it reached 105 degrees.

At that temperature it starts to set, so you syphon off half a spoonful and drop it onto a saucer. Two minutes later, when it’s had time to cool, you run your finger through it and, if it crinkles up with a skin, it’s ready to be put into jars. We got 10 half-pound (8oz) jars from it.

Our other makings were far easier, and much quicker. We bought a can of Ma Mada marmalade. It’s not actually marmalade, but bitter Seville oranges cut into pieces and marinaded in water and pectin to make it set.

Marmalade

To make things a bit more interesting, we finely chopped some fresh ginger and stirred this into the mix, along with three quarters of a pint of water and four pounds of sugar.

It very quickly starts to turn into what looks like marmalade. The sugar quickly dissolves, and you only need boil it for 15 minutes or so before doing the finger-through-jam-on-saucer trick above (although getting it to the boil takes a little longer).

From that single 94p can of fruit we got 12 jars of orange and ginger marmalade, or 8oz each. That should keep us going through the winter.

The tiniest carrot ever

Everything we’ve grown and eaten from the garden has been nice so far, but I’ve doubted that in many cases they were better than what we could have bought from the shops. The strawberries (all 24 of them) were more strawberryish, and the smaller tomatoes have all been very intense. The broccoli was more green than anything we have seen in the shops, and the cultivated blackberries are fatter and jucier than anything you see growing wild.

This week, though, we pulled our first carrots, and they are, without doubt, the best carrots I have ever tasted. They are so sweet and juicy that I know if I’d eaten these as a child I’d never have hated them so much.

I can’t wait until we eat the rest of the run but, on the other hand, I want to eek them out so they last. Carrot dilemma.

What do you do with 6kg of tomatoes that need using sooner rather than later? Chutney, of course.

Unfortunately the onion crop hasn’t come to much, so we bought a dozen medium-sized bulbs, and sliced them and the tomatoes into a large jam pan, then set them to reduce at a medium heat.

Now we were led to believe that it would take about 40 minutes for them to reduce down, which seemed to be about right, so we took the estimate of a further 40 minutes to thicken after we’d added the sugar, salt, cayenne pepper and paprika on faith. That was a mistake.

Every hour or so we spooned a little out onto a plate to see how runny it was, and it was only after four hours of bubbling away that it was holding together. It tasted great, but it won’t be ready to eat for another month or three at the least, while it mellows and matures in the jars.

Potting it was fun in itself. We sterilised a couple of dozen 8oz jars in the oven, then filled them using a wide-mouthed metal funnel, slipped a circle of waxed paper on top of the fruity slop and then stretched wetted cellophane over the top, secured by a little rubber band. The lids will be screwed on tomorrow when it’s fully cooled.

So what went in? Well, 6kg of yellow and red tomatoes (and a single green one), 1kg of onions, 700g of sugar, a pint of vinegar, 50g of salt, 4tsp of paprika and half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. We adapted it from The Foody.

Beetroot cake

We were shopping in Ilva a few weeks back and ended up in the cafe where they were selling Beetroot cake. Knowing that we had beetroot growing in the garden we passed it by in favour of scones, swearing to make our own when they were grown.

So today we did. A quick Googlage showed that Riverford had the best recipe, which we doubled as we had so much beetroot to use.

It’s quite low fat. Just beetroot, sugar, sultanas, sunflower oil, eggs, flour and baking powder in various quantities, mixed together and thrown into two tins. We cooked each one for an hour, took them out to cool, and then sliced out the first wedge to eat. It was a bit strange at first, and far more beetrooty than we’d expected, although why that was the case I don’t know. There was a lot of the stuff in it, after all.

Once you got past that, though, it was lovely, and I’m glad we have another loaf in the freezer for when this first one is gone. Not least because it means I won’t have to spend another hour getting purple fingers from an hour of grating half a kilo of beetroot.

How can so much happen in a single week? When we headed off to Cornwall last weekend, the garden was happily pootling along. Today we come back, and a week of sunshine and some careful watering from the builder has seen the whole place go mad.

The greenhouse was laden with countless red and yellow tomatoes, the blackberry bush heavy with fruit, and the peppers now at the size where you’d start to think about picking and eating them.

So we harvested 5.5kg of tomatoes and ordered some jars to make chutney tomorrow, picked blackberries to put in the freezer and dug up a bag full of beetroot to make beetroot loaf, which by all reports is like a red version of carrot cake.

The only real casualty was the broccoli, which has come to the end of its run. It’s now entirely gone to seed and is sporting eight bunches of cheery yellow flowers, which are what the broccoli head eventually becomes if you leave it too long.