Christmas Cooking

Hi all, I took some time in between sewing to make up my Mincemeat!




It's this recipe, which is a good old Delia one, so I am hoping it should taste good. She has two recipes on her website and this is the cranberry one. It was all mixed in a bowl, then put in the oven on a low temperature and it made the whole house smell of Christmas!

Halloween

B O O ! Here's my Halloween bunting!




Great for anyone having a Halloween party!

...down in the garden I have been harvesting my squash. These are so easy to grow and great if you have children as they grow so quickly they won't get bored with them! You can buy many different varieties of squash seed, but I just saved seeds from some organic squash we had bought to eat and then sowed them in pots in April/May.
Once they were sturdy enough we planted them out and they just took over! They scramble quite far, but if space is limited I think you could probably train them up some trellis. In fact I might try that next year. Although you have to protect them form slugs and snails when they are small plants, once established as strong healthy plants, they didn't really have any problems.
We have eaten them roasted with just butter and a few spices; cumin, cinnamon and chilli powder. They also make delicious soup. A real taste of Autumn!

PYO and Jam

Hope you all had a good bank holiday weekend. We went to a PYO farm on Saturday. Resulting in huge bag of apples, damsons and plums; one bruised face from falling bramley and one large bite from flying insect! Still, it was great fun!
Got up early yesterday and made the damsons into some jam, delicious!



Last week I had to start picking my tomatoes. The warm and humid weather this summer has meant they have succumbed to blight. It was quite depressing pulling up all the plants; remembering how exciting it was planting them all out as little seedlings. But I will salvage what I can, I've put them on the window sill with a couple of bananas (it's supposed to help ripen them) and I'll use the rest for chutney. Yes another batch of Green Tomato Chutney! Seems the last three years have proved very difficult for my tomatoes.


My Mum has some glass Kilner jars and we bought some new lids for them from ebay so I'm going to have a go at bottling some of the red tomatoes and some fuits. Have to read up on it first but will post soon on how I get on.