Making use of our booty

Having spent the last week or so trying out different recipes for pumpkin I've come to a conclusion - it tastes of nothing.  I tried roasting it, mashing it, souping it and despite my best efforts it still tasted of very little.  The only recipe I used it in that actually tasted of anything was pumpkin curry when the spices and coconut cream helped to mask the fact that pumpkin doesn't actually taste of anything.  This was a bit disappointing to find out, especially seeing as we have another one lurking in a cupboard waiting to be turned into a lantern for a Live Action Role Play event that we're going to over the Halloween weekend.

I did however find out that home roasted pumpkin seeds are lovely.  I'll definitely be doing these again.


Roasted Pumpkin seeds

After chopping the pumpkin scoop out the seeds and place in a colander.  Wash to get rid of all the gunk then dry with kitchen towels.

Place in a high sided baking dish and coat with oil and whatever spices take your fancy, I used salt and paprika.  Roast at 200 for 15-20 minutes.

With the berries and pears that we gathered I made a lovely autumn jam which I'm hoping will go down well as a little extra Christmas present this year.

Autumn Jam

500g Pears, peeled and chopped
400g soft berries, I used a mixture of blackberries, strawberries and raspberry's
1kg Jam sugar

Place a saucer in the freezer; this will be used to check the readiness of the jam later on.  Put jars in the over to sterilize. See here for more details.

Place the pears in a large pan with a bit of water.  Cook under a medium heat for 10-15 minutes until soft then add the berries.  Simmer for 10-15 minutes until all the berry juices are released.

Add the Jam sugar and bring to the boil.  After 10 minutes take the saucer out of the freezer and place a blob of the jam on it.  Leave it to cool for a few seconds and if it's ready a skin will form on the surface that will wrinkle when pushed with your finger.  If this doesn't happen let it bubble away for another few minutes until it passes the saucer test.

Once the jam is ready put it in the sterilized jars and store in a cool place.

This weekend was marked by two foodie expeditions.  The first was the Wing Yip, the Chinese supermarket on the outskirts of Croydon.  The place is a mecca for the bargain hunting foodie - it has exotic ingredients (chicken feet anyone?) Chinese cookery essentials and purse friendly spices.  Oh and lots of brightly coloured sweets with their Manga inspired packaging which appeal to the barely suppressed 5 year old girl that lurks inside me.

On Sunday we decided to take advantage of one of the few free weekends we have over the next couple of months and do some Autumnal fruit picking.  I found a place called Garson's which seemed to be one of the few places that is still doing pick your own this late in the year so on Sunday we trekked over there.  Little did I realise that it was not that far from Hampton Court Palace, which is about 20 miles away from where we live.  C was not impressed.

The weather was less than pleasant throughout the journey and it looked as if the entire trip might be a bit of a washout but luckily before too long the rain turned to sunshine and the day decided to be a nice one after all.  F managed to find every puddle in the place and I was very glad that I'd thought ahead and dug out his wellies.  Bloody Peppa Pig has a lot to answer for!  At one point he had muddy water on his forehead which I thought was fairly impressive.

We came away with two nice sized pumpkins, corn on the cob, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries.  We were all rather surprised to see strawberries this late in the year and most of them were a bit ropey but we were able to get a number of nice ones.

One of the pumpkins will be turned into pumpkin curry tonight, I plan on roasting some to go with chicken later in the week and there'll probably be soup at some point.  The other we'll be keeping until Halloween when we'll have a go at carving.

The berries I'm planning on using in a number of ways - we have friends coming round to play Dungeons and Dragons tomorrow night and I thought that seeing as I have some egg whites frozen after doing ice cream a couple of weeks ago I'd turn them into meringues and have Eton Mess.   The rest I'll turn into autumn jam along with some of the pears from the outlaws tree.  I've never had a go at jam so it should be interesting!

Preparing for Christmas (yes I know it's only October)

We recently got given a bag of pears by C's parents who have a tree. I've never been much of a fan of pears – I'll eat them if given them but they're not something I'd actually go out and buy. I wanted to do something different with them rather than doing the obvious thing and using them in a crumble. For the past few years a couple of weeks before Christmas I'd start thinking 'I should have done some chutney's or jams or something like that' but because these things need to be started well in advance by the time I'd thought of it it was inevitably too late. This year, inspired by the pears, I decided to actually do some canning rather than just thinking about it and a quick google bought up several interesting looking recipes for pear chutney. I looked through them and decided to use a James Martin recipe as a basis but change it a bit to suit my tastes (and budget)

Pear and raisin chutney (made 3 jars)

2 onions

1 tsp butter

100g raisins

100g sugar

500g pears

300 ml vinegar

tsp cloves

tsp chili powder

tsp mixed spice

1 star anise

Finely slice the onions. Heat some oil in a pan along with the butter – putting the oil in will help prevent the butter from burning. Put the onions in the pan under a medium/low heat and cook with the lid on for 10 minutes. This will caramelise the onions and bring out their natural sweetness.

After 10 minutes add the raisins and sugar and a splash of water. Again put the lid on and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the pears, vinegar and spices and bring to the boil. Allow to simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally to make sure it doesn't stick. Once cooked fish out the star anise and spoon into sterilised jars.

How to sterilise jars

Wash the jars in hot water and rinse to get rid of the bubbles. Place on a baking tray and put in a warm oven for 20-30 minutes. Use immediately.