Blackberry hunting

We had to search very hard indeed  just to find this paltry amount of teeny-tiny blackberries in Epping Forest today.  The weird weather this year has not suited the blackberries.

The sun is HOT here right now - it has been nudging 30 degrees for the last few days - and Epping Forest did at least provide plenty of shade this morning while we foraged for our berries.

 

 

I think we've gathered just enough for a crumble, if I bulk it out with the apples from the fruit bowl too.  There won't be enough for blackberry jam, though, which is a great sadness.

The inevitability of fruit picking

There is a cycle of inevitability about my visits to the PYO farm.

I love the idea of marching around the fields, picking punnet after punnet full of glorious, jewelled fruit .

I bring the children with me, and forget how fast and efficient they are at picking fruit.  They are no longer toddlers who spend five minutes looking under every strawberry leaf for caterpillars. These days they can strip a blackcurrant bush of it's fruit before you can say 'Ribena'.

I loose all sense of perspective as I stand in a massive farm, with fruit bushes, trees and neat rows of vegetables stretching away literally as far as the eye can see.

My trolley full of punnets and bags looks really quite modest in this context.

I get back home, unload the boxes of fruit, and realise that I have got carried away at the PYO farm.  Again.  This happens every year.

I stay up until gone midnight, scaring myself witless with boiling sugar - jamming and canning all the fruit.

The next morning I look at the stash of jars, piled onto the top shelf in the back kitchen and feel so proud of myself.  Here is a collection of summer fruit which will see us through the winter very happily.

I'll definitely be back again next year to repeat this cycle all over again.  You can find some of my previous years' adventures at the PYO and in jamming here, here, here and here.

This year's statistics:

Purchased

• 2 big punnets strawberries
• 1 big punnet plums
• 1 small punnet raspberries
• 1 small punnet blackberries
• 1 small punnet blackcurrants
• 1 huge bag French beans
• 3 courgettes
• 1 pot of honey

Made

• 1 enormous plum crumble
• 1 blackcurrant and almond cake
• 10 pots strawberry jam
• 8 pots blackcurrant and blackberry jam
• 4 large jars of stewed plums
• 1 enormous strawberry and almond crumble

And we still have 1 punnet of strawberries and 1 punnet of raspberries, keeping cool and available for greedy scoffing whenever we like.  That's the best bit.

A new approach to fruit gluts

I have had a really good crop of rhubarb in my garden this summer.  I have been cutting big handfuls of stalks, like this one I cut last night, every couple of weeks.  There is not enough rhubarb here to call it a glut, but there are still many things I will do with it:

• poached very briefly in orange juice, to eat with yogurt for breakfast
• put into a cake - Nigella has plenty of recipes, and there is also this fantastic one from Driftwood that I have made several times
• rhubarb and apple crumble

However, I have also been tackling proper fruit gluts this summer.  The branches on the plum trees at Mum & Dad's house were snapping under the weight of plums.

A glut of cherry plums in Mum & Dad's garden

And the wild hedgerow plum trees all through southern France were dropping plums and sweet juice all over the roadside.  When we went for walks we gathered and ate the plums as we walked.

Just look at the glee on their faces at yet more sweet plums!

Gathering greengages in my dress on an evening walk

Mum had already made several batches of jam before we arrived, and I had spent a few days making strawberry jam back in England, so our stocks of jam were already good.  And jam making is a slow, hot and sticky business when the weather is hot too. 

I saw a great range of these Le Parfait jars in the local supermarket and suddenly thought I might like to have a go at canning, or bottling, the plums.  Canning seems to be the word used in America, and bottling seems to be the word used in Britain, but they are exactly the same thing.  In France they use the word 'conserver' to describe everything from jam making to pickling of cornichons.  Like our umbrella term 'preserving'.

The internet gave me a million different methods of bottling fruit, and these varied wildly according to which country the instructions came from.  In the end we went with a method that was part various American YouTube tutorials and part a kind friend's emailed excerpts from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook.

This is what we did:

• We halved and stoned the plums and put them into sterilised jars. 
• We made a 50:50 sugar syrup, using 500g caster sugar and 500ml water, and when it was still hot poured this over the plums until it reached the mark at the top of the jars. 
• Then we placed the first lid (the lid that seals the jar) lightly on top, and then partially screwed the second lid on top. 
• To seal the jars you then have to heat them.  This is where I was most unsure of my method.  Some sources said to heat the jars in a water bath, some said to heat directly in the oven.  Times and temperatures varied wildly.  Hugh F-W said we could do either method, so we went with the water bath.
• We put the jars of plums into a large pan, sitting them on a folded tea-towel.  Then we poured boiling water into the pan until it came half-way up the jars. 
• The pan full of water and jars then went into a hot oven (gas mark 8) for forty minutes.
• The jars were taken out and left to get completely cold overnight.  Then I checked that the first lid had completely sealed, and tightened the second lid.

The whole process was far quicker than making jam, and gives you fruit preserved in syrup, which can then be eaten with yogurt, cream or custard, and made into cakes or crumbles.

We learnt that we needed to pack the fruit in much, much tighter than we had done the first time, and that we could also use a much weaker sugar syrup.  175g of sugar to 600ml of water makes a good syrup that works on any type of fruit apart from the very sourest (such as damsons or gooseberries).

But even so the whole experiment was a great success.  We opened one jar a week later to try it out, and were swooning with delight at how tasty it was (nothing to do with the very sweet 50:50 sugar syrup, I'm sure).

Slightly obsessed by this point, I went on to bottle some tomato sauce.  The weekly markets always had incredible tomato stalls and one Sunday I succumbed to this enormous crate for €10 (which I then lugged around the crowded market, while C and O pretended not to know me).

I also bought a huge bunch of basil and a bag of garlic and shallots, and made industrial quantities of tomato and basil pasta sauce.  I spooned the hot sauce into the sterilised jars, put on the lids as I did for the plums, and then sealed them using the same water bath method.

And when we came to leave Mum and Dad's to drive to Switzerland, the car boot was half full of bottled plums and tomato & basil sauce.  I also brought back some more jars from the supermarket so that I can do some bottling at home, but if you want to have a go yourself you don't need to go to France for the jars and replacement inner (sealing) lids.  You can buy them online here and here.

This week I'm off to the PYO farm, because they still have plenty of summer berries and tomatoes for me to pick, and I still have a dozen empty jars waiting for me in the kitchen.

My fruit glut - ready to be put into the car and driven home, via Switzerland

Milkshake, chocolate and jam

We're nearly done with the back garden cherry glut.  There are just a few left on the tree now - so dark that they are almost black; teasingly dripping sugary juice directly into the hens' run on the ground below.  The children and I went to our favourite PYO very early on Saturday morning and picked six baskets of strawberries and bought a couple of big boxes of gooseberries as well - creating our very own strawberry and gooseberry glut instead.

Everyone had their own ideas of what do do with all this fruit.  Cam made endless strawberry milkshakes all weekend - about ten big, juicy strawberries, a large dollop of vanilla ice cream and half a pint of milk, all blitzed up in my blender and then gulped down, while lying prone on the sofa watching the tennis. 

Livvy wanted to make strawberries dipped in chocolate.

She's now tall enough to be able to stand at the stove to cook, so I showed her how to melt the chocolate over a pan of water, and then dip the strawberries in the chocolate and gently lay them down on the greasproof paper.  She loves the fact that she is now tall enough to cook by herself, and wants to do it all the time.

And I knew that most of the rest of the strawberries would end up as jam.  I made the jam yesterday afternoon - as the temperatures climbed relentlessly upwards. I was tired, hot, headachey and sticky by the end of the evening.  As I cleaned up the kitchen and all the jam making kit, I never wanted to see another strawberry again.

But when I saw all the pots of jam (all eighteen of them!) gleaming in the sunshine this morning I was delighted.

Livvy's right.  Strawberry jam rocks.

Packing up and moving on

August into September is much more of a New Year for me than December into January. It is a time for the end of the long summer holidays and the beginning of a new academic year; I make new resolutions and turn over new leaves; we pack away the old and start unwrapping the new.

In the last week we've said goodbye to the summer holidays.


G finished six months of training and his first half-ironman race.


And I left work.



The children have started in new classes at school; C's comes with a whole new playground and extra responsibilities. O has a strict teacher.

We're beginning to find our way with an entirely new and unfamiliar family routine. I can pick up the children from school every day now, but we've said goodbye to the childminder who helped me look after C and O for the last five years. We all cried. C is still crying actually.

But also we're enjoying the late summer sunshine, and some of the plum jam I made for our breakfast toast through the winter.

I think it will be a good year.

Busy, busy

You might not see me around here for a while.

The children picked so many plums and strawberries today...

...and I bought so much jam sugar...

...that I'm going to be kept busy for a very long time.

Holidays, mountains, milk and a plan

I'm now at that stage of the summer where I feel unsettled. I am back at work, but the children are not back at school. Our holiday is passed, but there is still fun and relaxation to be had. The evenings are drawing in ever so slightly, but it is not yet autumn. I've got things to do and I don't feel ready to start any of them yet. Maybe I'm trying to eke out my summer holiday just a little bit longer.

And that's not surprising, because our trip to Bala Lake in Snowdonia, and to Coniston in the Lake District, was awesome. We spent our time walking, admiring mountains, swimming in icy lakes (G, C and O - not me!), walking some more, admiring the mountains a bit more, and watching the Olympics when we were tired after our walks. I don't get to walk up any mountains at home in East London, so I miss them now I'm back.







This morning I had a glass of cold milk with my breakfast. The serenity of a simple glass of white milk is so pleasing early in the day.

I drank my milk and put together a list of things I still want to do with the rest of the summer. Somehow. Maybe these will be tucked into odd days and afternoons, but that's okay - there's still a bit of summer left.

• make more jam (the only jam I've made so far this summer has been Anna's blackberry jam, which is sublime but has been eaten already)
• read another Secret Seven book with O
• make some more recipes from Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer (cherry cake and Milly-Molly-Mandy's patty pan sultana cakes made so far - both fabulous)
• Plant some lavender into pots for beside the front door
• more lazy days with friends, before the school term starts
• find some more geocaches - even though we don't have any mountains, there are always nice walks to be had in Epping Forest.
  

What are your plans for the last few weeks of summer?

~~~~~~~~~~

Jane at the wonderfully witty Petticoat Lane has kindly nominated me for an award. And to pass on the love I am going to give a long overdue update to my sidebar list of Blogs I Like to Catch Up On. Thank you Jane!

Places where I have found sticky patches of marmalade today

• On the handle of the bread machine bucket
• On the side of the kettle
• On the bread board
• On the hens' food bowls
• Underneath the kitchen taps
• On O's clean school shirt, hanging on the drying rack
• On the biggest leaf of my 10 year old African Violet

I'm so glad seville oranges are only in season for about 3 weeks each year.

Pancakes

Last night G and I went out for a wonderful meal, to celebrate 11 years of being together, which we washed down with way more wine than we are used to drinking. We are definitely too old now to have hangovers.

O had been asking for pancakes for weeks now, so to soothe our sore heads and appease the children I made them for breakfast this morning.

Good pancake toppings

• Lemon juice and sugar (this one is by far the best for hangovers too - has a refreshing cleanness to it)
• maple syrup and creme fraiche
• runny honey
• strawberry jam
• golden syrup
• chocolate or toffee sauces bought in a moment of weakness when shopping with children
• sliced banana (perhaps with one of those sauces)

Even the making of pancakes is a nice, gentle job for a tired person. Whisking, pouring, watching and flipping.

.

Delights in domesticity

I am discovering, as I get older, that there are many good things to be found in domestic life. The satisfaction and quiet pleasure to be found in everyday home-based pursuits is something that I have overlooked for many years.

Domesticity is a strange mixture of drudgery and delight. I find that the more time I spend away from home, whether at work, running errands or just gadding about, the more the drudgery part dominates. This is probably why I felt so discombobulated (I always love an opportunity to use that word!) on Sunday evening after a strangely busy weekend.

When I am properly at home, for several days at a time, I tune in more to the rhythms of home life, and I find that I can get a great deal of satisfaction from the more pleasurable tasks.

Domestic delights:

• The sound of the washing machine. Is there really any nicer sound? It gives me a real inner peace to hear the sound of the washing machine gently sploshing away, getting everything clean and sweet-smelling for me.
• Making bread. Apart from the smell of freshly baked bread, which is so lovely, there is something pleasingly ancient about the act of making bread. It must be one of the oldest recipes known to man.
• Baking a cake. Or cakes. Makes me feel like a generous hostess from a more domestic era!
• Feeding the hens their corn in the mornings.
• Any sewing that involves using the sewing machine - such a great sound and pretty fabrics draped everywhere.
• Gathering dry washing in from the line outside. I bury my face into line-dried washing and inhale deeply. It smells almost as good as freshly baked bread.
• Putting clean sheets on the beds - I love this! And once slept in, the bed never looks as good again, until you change the sheets the next time.

Domestic drudgery:

• Sewing on name tapes. Really, really hate it.
• Washing up greasy frying pans because they are too big to fit in the dishwasher.
• Putting clean washing back into people's drawers and cupboards. There's so much of it!
• Dusting.
• Ironing.
• Changing light bulbs or batteries. No matter how many I buy, and despite having a cupboard FULL of assorted bulbs and batteries, I never seem to have the right one.

In our brave, scary, 21st Century world, where many people are striving to return to a simpler way of living, there are of course more blogs and books lauding the underrated pleasures of domesticity than you could possibly imagine. I am very much looking forward to the publication of Jane Brocket's first book The Gentle Art of Domesticity which is published next month; I have been a big fan of her beautiful blog for a long time now.

I have finished my working week now and have two domestic days ahead of me. I'll start by putting a load of washing on, and by the time I have finished all my domestic delights I will need to sit down with a good book for a while, and then with any luck there won't be any time left for the drudgery part.