[JasonB]

I was looking through some old photos of when we first moved out to the country a few years ago, so I thought I'd foist a few of the food related photos upon you, and take the opportunity to yap on about the stuff we grow, and make.


You can probably tell how excited I was about growing our own produce for the first time by the fact that I actually took photos of it, and even made labels for the various jars of stuff I made. That soon stopped as the production of food and drink, and therefore work, increased.


Anyway, my wife Sally is the real gardener, so she set to work on our little veg plot, and with me not really being as keen a gardener the first thing to come under my beady eye were the apples, which only needed picking.

   


We have eight or nine mature apple trees, but apart from the odd apple crumble we weren't really making much use of them, and a lot of them were just rotting on the ground. So I experimented with making Cider, and it turned out to be fairly simple, doing it the old fashioned way.


The first year I just made a few bottles.

       


But now we have quite a production line each Autumn.


The apples are scratted to break them up, then pressed to get out the juice.

       


The apple juice is then bucketed up and the natural yeasts are left to get on with it, with the addition of sugar if it starts to taste a bit tart. The left over apple solids get mixed with water and used to make cider vinegar, which is exactly the same process, with the exception of letting air into the buckets. I leave it all in the shed over the winter and bottle it up in January or February. We now get about 40-50 litres of cider, and 10-15 litres of vinegar each year. Both are really nice.

       


Next came tomatoes and chillies. Well, we had greenhouses, so we obviously wanted to make use of them, and everybody says that supermarket tomatoes are rubbish, so off I went. Armed with little more than a willingness to give it a try, and no expectations, I had a go. The results were a surprise. The tomatoes were brilliant, fresh, zingy, and fragrant. A big step up from their bland supermarket cousins.

       


I had similarly low expectations for the chillies, mainly because I was particularly fond of Linghams chilli sauce, and doubted that I would ever be able to match it. I was wrong. Armed with the home grown tomatoes, chillies, and cider vinegar, and only adding sugar, I made some lovely chilli sauce. In fact I didn't seem to be able to go wrong. Each batch was different, some were mild, some hot, but all of them were great. This year I made about 15 jars of it, enough to last us the year.

       


At the same time we had some soft fruits; strawberries and raspberries, and we later added more of those, plus blackcurrants, redcurrants, and gooseberries.

       


Now, I'm very fond of jam on toast for breakfast, so obviously I had to try jam making. Well it couldn't be easier, and again a definite step up in flavour from anything I'd tasted before. I tend to make “whatever's ripe today” jam, so each batch has a different flavour as the season moves on and different fruits ripen. The summer starts for us with a predominance of strawberries, then raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, and finally the autumn fruiting raspberries. But each of them overlap.

       


I've also been building up our herb stocks, as I use herbs a lot in cooking, and I dry a lot of them for winter use. So, after making a new herb bed this year we've now got substantial amounts of rosemary, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, lovage, chives, garlic chives, mint, parsley etc. We use these an awful lot, and there is nothing like being able to just pop out and pick a big handful of fresh herbs to chuck into the pot.

       


The vegetables are more Sally's area, and she grows the usual staples, such as potatoes, beans, peas, courgettes, leeks and broccoli, usually along with something a little more unusual, such as salsify, or celeriac, or whatever takes her fancy. Most of them are eaten as fresh as possible through the summer months, but we freeze or dry plenty of beans, cook and freeze loads of courgette, and obviously the leeks can be harvested through the winter.


       


Then there are the salads, which we can't get enough of over the summer. Beautiful, fresh, and most importantly cool. We grow lots of different lettuce varieties, and also celery, sorrel, radishes, tomatoes, sometimes cucumber, and we even tried tomatillos last year. We usually add herbs like chervil, and chives, and make up herb dressings also using our cider vinegar. When I'm feeling artistic, I add some edible flower petals for colour, and actually bother to arrange it nicely.

           


And finally, there are the constant, and ongoing experiments which have so far included nettle soup, elderflower champagne, mint beer, membrillo, aguas frescas, pesto, chimichurri, wild sorrel sauce, rhubarb wine, a multitude of chutneys, and a whole load of other stuff I haven't even got names for.

       


We've never eaten so well as we do now, and it's also great to know that your food hasn't been grown with or washed in nasty chemicals.