It's jamming and saucing season

 Cherry plum Jam

I sort of followed the directions HERE

I used 1.1 kg of fruit weighted after I had cooked and removed the stones

and an equal amount of sugar.

 I love my Moulin, it makes it easy to get rid of of the stones and skins

 Three jars and a bowl of jam in the fridge.

The kids have taste tested and approved.

 Pete picked 3.2kg of tomatoes today.

I used a half recipe of my sauce recipe.

 The Moulin got another work out.

 The result, some very happy kids, two bottles of sauce 

and a bowl of sauce to go with the sausages for dinner tonight.

While I was busy in the kitchen, Pete was busy putting in the new path.

He had some help from Lilly.

Russian Garlic

Elephant Garlic also known as Russian Garlic.
The cloves are HUGE.
Mum gave us some cloves from her garden a couple of years ago.
Mum said once you plant it it's there forever and she's right so far. It came up by itself this year.
It's classed as an environmental weed in WA
I dug up the remainder of our Garlic crop this afternoon.
Washed, dried and sliced it

and put it in the food dehydrator.
The house now is aromatic. (stinks of garlic).
This years crop should last us until next years.
We have a crop of chillies and Lemongrass I want to dry next.

Homemade Tomato Sauce

I spent the morning sewing. I made Fern a blouse to go with her skirt. It's an Enid pattern so I blogged it over on my Enid blog. I spent the afternoon making tomato sauce. Using my tried and true recipe. Last year I had the use of my friend Lisa's Moulin. This year I bought my own.

Peter helped and washed and de-stalked all the tomatoes.
The new stove is a lot bigger and the pots sit without overhanging. I can get 3 large stockpots on the new stove. I struggled to get 2 on my old stove.

A moulin makes it so easy to get the seeds and skins out of the sauce.
I found my Moulin on Ebay on a buy it now. I was so happy as I only paid $16.95 with free postage and the ones on the Auction had been going for over $40!
I prefer these old metal Moulin to the modern plastic ones.

Here's the results. The large jars are 750ml.

Food Dehydrator

Ezidri Dehydrator

A new purchase. The local electrical store has just got these in stock. I've had this on my want list for a while. We'll be using it to dry our homegrown produce this year. I'm looking forward to making fruit roll ups for the kids. It can even be used for drying soups and meals.

I used it to dehydrate some oranges. Worked really well. I now want to buy some extra trays to make larger batches as it costs no more to dehydrate 15 trays as 5.

Homemade Tomato Sauce

6 KG Ripe Tomatoes - chopped
500 gms onions - peeled and chopped
500 gms apples - peeled and chopped
4 cloves of garlic - chopped fine
2 cups of Sugar
4 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon cloves
1 tablespoon curry powder
Chilli powder to taste
5 cups of Vinegar

Put it all into a HUGE saucepan and cook until everything is mush around 2 hours.
Push the sauce through a strainer to remove the skins, cloves and seeds.
Rapid boil until the sauce is halved.
Bottle it.


It does take ages to make but the taste is well worth it. To make the job easier I need to buy a food mill.

The tomatoes came from our garden and a friends. Our friends brought us the apples too, also grown locally. The garlic was grown in our garden.

I should be able to make a few more batches of this sauce in the coming weeks as the tomatoes will soon be at full production.

Tomato Sauce

Tomato Sauce

Makes approx 1.5 lts of sauce.

3 kilos Tomatos
250 grams Apples
250 grams Onions.
1 clove of garlic
2 chillis
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 cups white vinegar
1 cup sugar

Wash and chop tomatos. Don't bother peeling them as the mixture gets pushed through a seive.
Put into a large heavy based pan.
Peel and chop onions, garlic, chilli and apples add to pan
Add curry powder, cloves, vinegar and sugar.

Bring to boil and simmer for 2 hours.
Press tomato mix through a strainer into another pan. I use a metal spoon to help mush the larger stuff through.

Boil the tomato sauce to reduce to the desired thickness.

Pour in to bottles and seal.

Pickling Beetroot

I'm preserving the beetroots in vinegar, water, sugar and spices with my Fowlers Varcola unit. Lilly likes to help. My hands resemble Lady Macbeth's! I should have worn gloves. I've found a site which will be great for helping me dye fabric with beetroot at Pioneerthinking.com

We also have a walnut tree in the garden :D I see some more dyeing happening. I may even let the kids play with me.

Preserving

I'm over making jam and preserving fruit.
We now have 24 no27 jars of Apricots 9 jars of Mulberrries preserved.
There are 16 jars of Apricot Jam and I made over 30 jars of Mullberry!
I burnt one batch of Apricot jam. It still tastes OK but the pan took forever to clean. I had to boil vinegar in it and soak it for a couple of days. It did clean thankfully.