I like pickled onions even less then plums. But, after pickling our own a couple of weeks ago in time for Christmas, even I could be tempted to try a few. It was something that Nik wanted to have a go at, and as we’d harvested the onions from the garden a few days earlier, a vinegar bath was seemingly almost inevitable for the crop we’d dug up.

Pickling is no ordinary bath, though – it takes two days to prepare, but it is an easy process to get going.

On day one, peel the onions and chop off the tops and tails, so you’re left with a flat-edged vegetable with lots of green-white flesh. Be careful when you’re chopping the roots off that you don’t cut too much into the body of the onion itself, as it’s the base that holds it together.

Cover your freshly-skinned onions with a salt and water mix in a large pan.  In another pan, fully dissolve 250g of salt into two litres of water to make a brine, and pour this over the onions, too. If this doesn’t cover them, then make up some more in the same proportions. When the vegetables are totally covered with the brine mixture, cover them with plates to keep them under the water and leave them for 24 hours to dry out a little.

On day two, remove the onions from the brine and rinse them well and dry thoroughly, in readiness for storing in jars. The glass containers must be sterilised first, so either run them through a hot dishwasher or a 100 degrees Celsius oven. Leave them to cool naturally.

When both the jars and the onions are dry, place the onions into the jars (we used large Kilner-style containers), and cover with malt vinegar. The liquid must come right up to the top of the vegetables and cover them, in order to seal them. It’s recommended that they should be left for a few weeks before eating, so the festive period should be perfect timing. Lovely?

As family and friends will tell you, I’m not that keen on plums, but, as the hedgerows and trees around the house have a more than plentiful supply, we thought we’d have a go at making plum wine. Different to the wine we’ve made in kits, we’re hoping this will be a little fruitier, with maybe even more of a kick than than the self-distilling products.

Picking 5.5kg (12lbs) of fruit, we placed the foraged plums in the fermenter and covered with two gallons of hot water to split the skins and let the pulp inside seep out and turn the liquid into a thick mush. We left it in this state for two weeks. The sight of mould peppering the top of the now thick syrup-like liquid, signalled that the first stage of natural fermentation was complete. Onto stage two.

First, the whole lot was syphoned off into a second fermenter, when 4kg of a boiling water and sugar mixture and some brewers’ yeast was added. The sugar syrup has to be added slowly, though, until the plum juice is clear. The yeast has to be measured, too; one teaspoon for every gallon of brew meant that we needed three teaspoons. Accompanied by another good stir, we capped the mixture with an air lock to release any further fermenting pressure and left it for another fortnight, quietly bubbling away.

Before bottling, the brew has to have stopped fermenting, to stop the stuff exploding. Campden tablets usually do the trick; they both kill off any remaining bacteria and stop the wine picking up contamination when it comes to syphoning into bottles. And although they’re explosive in concentrated form, too, diluting them negates this. Adding one tablet for every gallon of wine saw us add two and a half tablets, balancing our 10 litres of brew.

We syphoned the wine off into bottles last week, and just had enough to fill 12 bottles. A very pretty blush-pink liquid, they look perfect for the summer. Which is just as well – before we can drink them, we have to leave them in the outhouse for six to nine months to clear. It’s going to be a boozy 2010; the cider will ready then, too…

Since the middle of August, I’ve been busier than ever working, and trying to get a new online project off the ground. That’s taken more time than I’d envisaged, but thankfully, while it will be an ongoing project, the first stage is almost complete.

Nik has been just as busy, tidying up the garden and emptying the vegetable plot. He’s been harvesting sunflowers, making crab apple jelly, taking out the onions, making fig jam, planting cauliflowers and cabbage, and trimming the tomatoes, to try and spook them into actually ripening.

We’ve both been picking apples for our first foray into cider-making, taking plums off the trees near the nature reserve to make plum wine and collecting both blackberries and sloes, the latter to make this year’s stash of sloe gin or vodka.

Fun has been on the agenda, too, though. We’ve been watching the contenders sing their hearts out in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest, catching up with ‘Allo ‘Allo, Fawlty Towers, Howard’s Way and Stephen Fry in America, visiting family and friends, and enjoying the odd meal in the garden, although I suspect that’s soon to stop.

So, busy, busy, busy. It’s better than bored, bored, bored, and I’ve certainly not been doing nothing. Hopefully the merry-go-round to Busyville should start to slow a little now, which is good. If it doesn’t, there’ll be no time to get off…

We’ve had another very enjoyable Christmas, with a mixture of entertaining, and being entertained. After spending time with Nik’s family in Galleywood on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we hosted mum, Bart, and Geoff at the house, which meant planning a menu and cooking the dishes on it.

A soup was of course always going to make the menu final cut, and after the two dishes we’ve recently made, we needed a new variety to try. So, inspiration struck us while watching Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen, and we found the recipe for her roast squash and sweet potato soup.

Squash is such an autumnal/winter vegetable, and it looks tasty even when it hasn’t been cooked, the bright orange colour contrasting with whatever you choose to mix it with. Nigella couples her soup with a blue cheese and buttermilk sauce, but we chose to leave this out, as it’s not to everyone’s taste.

In Nigella’s recipe, the squash is roasted and blended with sweet potato

While the vegetables have to be roasted and then blended (amazingly with all the skins on), the recipe is simplicity itself, and makes a thick, hearty, and warming soup, full of spicy richness. If you’d like to make Nigella’s roast squash and sweet potato soup, you can find the recipe here.

Three hens-a-laying (left to right): Margot, Gerry, and Barbara’s eggs

With impeccable timing, it was at the start of last week, just in time for Christmas. It was a good job, too, as we needed some more of the chickens’ eggs for the neighbours’ Christmas hampers, which we put on their doorsteps on Christmas morning. Our friends in the road were very pleased; the eggs rubbed shoulders with jars of home made apple chutney, apple jelly, green tomato chutney, and bottles of home brewed beer wine.

Our home made 2008 Christmas hampers, full of self sufficient goodies

But, now that Gerry has matured (she now has yellow feet and an ever-growing comb) and started to lay properly, she’s getting a boisterous streak. It may be that with her new found skill, she’s also got new found confidence to quite literally bite the hands that feed her and her feathery chums.

Just last night when Nik went out to collect the eggs that had been laid later in the day, she nipped his hand through the egg collecting hatch of the Omlet Cube. And, on Christmas Eve she carried out a blocking tactic, standing in the doorway of the chicken house so that we couldn’t close the door and make sure that all three hens were safe for the night.

She’s certainly not living up to her hen-pecked Good Life TV character namesake, more the ginger-haired mischievous one formerly from the Spice Girls. And, rather fittingly, her personality seems to be getting spicier by the day…

The former chancellor’s daughter has always made cooking a little like porn with food, but never so much so as in this very rude but well-edited clip, posted by an enterprising YouTuber:

I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before, it was so easy. It’s only the second time we’ve bottled our home brewed beer, so perhaps the lack of experience played against us last time. Last night, though, we poured our latest batch of the dark golden stuff into its glass containers, learning some valuable lessons from the last time.

In April, we did it the tried and tested way, following the instructions to, quite literally, the letter. That means connecting the drainage tube with the filter on, and siphoning out the contents by way of an airflow into the bottles. Once it starts, it goes very fast and there has to be two of you; one to direct the siphon into the bottles, and one to have another bottle ready to swap when the previous one is full.

What the directions don’t tell you is that you end up with a very messy floor (unless you use a plastic bowl to stand the bottles in as we did), which the cat would delightfully drink up given half the chance. It’s undoubtedly a quick way of doing it, but as we found out, a bit too speedy. Then, it’s a case if wiping everything, and then capping the bottles themselves.

This time the method was a little longer, but much the better (and simpler) one. An initial siphon is given to separate any drinkable liquid from the sediment at the bottom of the fermenter, and any added wood chips which give the beer its ‘aged’ taste. Just the same as when we did the wine a few weeks ago, another fermenter is more than handy at this stage.

Then, rather than siphon the cleared brew into bottles, we used a large glass jug and a funnel to manually pour the beer into our brown bottles, which we’d already put a teaspoon of sugar into, to condition the liquid while it sits for a couple of weeks. And what a difference this method makes. While it may take a little longer, the whole process is much less messy, and virtually hassle-free.

In fact the only problem we had was a shortage of bottles. The home brew kit told us that we would make near 50 pints of ale, and as we only had 27 500cl bottles, we had to pour more than a good amount into a demijohn, and the remainder into one of the snap-top bottles we use for the fruit-tinged spirits. Even the capping seemed easier this time, too.

All in all, after just over an hour (and a little over a week to brew), another success. We had a taste, and our finished Woodforde Great Eastern Ale is very pleasant, and should be even more palatable once the sugar has worked its magic, giving us plenty of perfect brew, ready to be cracked open and drunk over the festive period and beyond.

With no sugar to add (it’s already included in the concentrate), this kit and the process is much simpler than the one which gave us such good results last time. The added airlock from the wine fermenter means we should be able to keep a more accurate eye on it, too.

First, we sterilised the fermenter, and stood the two 1.5kg cans of tar-like concentrate in boiling water for five minutes, as directed. Pouring them into the fermenter, we added 3.5 litres (6 pints) of boiling water and topped up to 23 litres (40 pints) with cold liquid, thoroughly mixing all the contents together.

Once they had dissolved, we then added the most potent ingredient, the yeast, and left it to bubble away next to the electric radiator in the kitchen for a few days. It’s certainly been doing something, as the bubbling has been almost constant, making us wonder how we managed to make so much good golden stuff the last time we tried.

All of that was on Sunday. It’s now Friday, and sometime over the weekend we’re hoping to test the brew for the correct gravity. If it’s all right, we can then bottle it, and learning from the wine and the beer the first time around, we should have it easier when it comes to siphoning. Fingers crossed.

This recipe goes especially well with homemade soup, and makes light and airy French-style bread, with a crusty top and edges. It could well be fine for sandwiches, too. Unlike the last homemade dough using our automatic bread machine, this was very much a success, and possibly the best loaf we’ve made.

Ingredients
350ml of water
20g or two tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of salt
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 egg
600g of plain flour
1 packet of dry yeast

Method
As before, this will be different for each automatic bread making machine, but our Bifinett KH1171 required the water, salt, sugar, egg, and flour to go in first, followed by the yeast. With the browning level set to medium, we left it for just over three hours until the machine had finished its process, tipping out the loaf when it been cooling for some time.

We were entertaining again last night, as Will and Becs came to visit from Walthamstow. An enjoyable evening was had by all, but to push ourselves a little further and divert from our now almost traditional menu of soup, quiche and salad, followed by chocolate mousse (all easy to make and useful if you have a glut of eggs like us), I made a different soup for our starter course.

Like the roasted pepper and tomato soup I made a couple of weeks ago, this one is also packed full of vegetable goodness, and is thick and creamy, thanks to the blended tofu. Not enough people use squashes as they seem to be afraid of them, but the butternut variety gives this recipe a lovely taste and golden colour.

This recipe goes especially well with home-baked crusty bread (but it can be quite filling), and makes four hearty bowlfuls.

Ingredients
1 large onion
200g of carrots
1 butternut squash (approximately 750g to 1kg in weight)
1 slice of root ginger
600ml (1 pint) of vegetable stock
250g tofu (if frozen, defrosted)

Method
Chop the onion roughly, and the carrots and squash into large cubes. Place the onion in a large saucepan or stock pot with a little olive oil, and heat gently until soft or for 10 minutes. Add the carrots, butternut squash, ginger and stock to the pan, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes.

Chop the tofu into rough cubes and add to the vegetable mixture, returning the pan to the boil once more. Once boiled, simmer the mixture for a further 10 minutes. Process the whole mixture through a food processor until smooth and creamy.

Serve into warmed soup bowls, or pour back into the saucepan and leave until ready to eat.  When ready to serve, warm gently, and serve with crusty bread, stirring in a little cream if necessary. Like the roasted pepper and tomato soup, this recipe can be made in batches, bagged, and put into the freezer, providing that the tofu hasn’t been frozen before.