Top Ten Uses for Apples

(The total lunar eclipse was a washout, with a thick layer of cloud across most of Britain. The alarm clock went off at 2:45 am, but when I looked out of the bedroom window all I could see was a bright orange glow caused by the street lights of Manchester bouncing off the unbroken low cloud, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.)

Here are ten uses for too many leftover apples, hanging around in the bottom of the fruit bowl and looking unappealing.

1. Tarte tatin

2. Gordon Tracy's Favourite Way of Eating Apples - bear with me. This is our family name for apples cored and cut into wedges, served with a dish of sugar mixed with cinnamon, for dipping. The name was a desperate attempt to trick Tom, then aged 2, into eating any kind of fresh fruit or vegetable at all. He was obsessed with Thunderbirds at the time, and his favourite character was Gordon Tracy. I offer the recipe to any parents who can't get their kids to eat fruit. Feel free to rename it with your own child's favourite fictional character.

3. Sourdough Apple Fritters

4. Cheese and apple toastie - cut an apple into quarters and grate it on a cheese grater. Also grate some Red Leicester cheese (or other cheese) and mix with the grated apple. Season with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and ground cumin. Make into sandwiches with sliced wholemeal bread and toast (we use one of those electric toasted sandwich makers, but you can also do it under a grill)

5. Chutney

6. I often chop an apple into my porridge or muesli for breakfast.

7. Apple Spiced Muffins

8. Stuffed baked apple - Core an apple and stuff the hole with something nice - leftover Christmas mincemeat works well, my dad keeps a jar of raisins soaked in rum to stuff apples with, or just improvise a mixture of raisins, porridge oats, chopped nuts, honey, or whatever you can find in the store cupboard. Bake the stuffed apple either in the microwave (you don't need one of those stupid plastic doodads they sell in the Bettaware catalogues, just bung it in a bowl, for heaven's sake) or in a moderate oven until the apple has softened. Serve with ice cream.

9. Braised red cabbage with apple (recipe is near the bottom of the page).

10. Apple pie - Here's a little-known secret. The best apple pies are not made with cooking apples such as Bramleys. Cooking apples turn to mush when you cook them. They're great for applesauce, and that's about it. If you want large succulent pieces of apple in your apple pie, use eating apples. But let's start with the pastry:

You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. Here is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 14oz plain flour into a bowl with 1 teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 8oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 4oz caster sugar, 8 egg yolks (sorry - this is not a frugal recipe unless you have your own chickens and plenty of eggs. But it really does make excellent pastry) and 1 teaspoon vanilla essence into the well. For apple pies I like to add some grated orange rind and ground cardamom, cinnamon or nutmeg. Rub everything in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.

Divide it into two, and roll one portion out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your greased 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't the join. Put the pastry shell, and the unused portion of pastry back in the fridge whilst you sort out the filling. Oh, and turn the oven on low.

Peel, core and roughly chop about 2lbs of eating apples. Put them in a pan with the merest splash of water, 2oz sugar and a few whole cloves, cover and cook for a few minutes until the apples are tender but not mushy. Carefully drain the apples. Don't go banging them about or they'll go to mush. Carefully put the drained apples in the bottom of the pastry shell (I don't bother picking out the cloves, I rather like the burst of tongue-numbing flavour when you bite into one in your wedge of apple pie, but if you hate that you'll have to pick them all out - I advise counting them when you put them in so you can be sure you get them all). Roll out the other portion of pastry and lie it on top of the pie. Pinch the edges together to seal the top layer to the bottom. Make a couple of slits in the top of the pie to let any steam out and stop the pie going soggy or exploding. Sprinkle generously with golden brown sugar, and bake in a low oven until it's done (I don't know how long, it depends on your oven, how big your pie dish is, how thin you rolled the pastry etc. Check on it after about 25 minutes, but be ready to give it an extra 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever until it looks golden and done. Also listen to your nose - if it smells done after 20 minutes then maybe it is. Have a look at it and see.)

Apple pie is nice hot or cold. Either way, serve with custard, ice cream, or whipped cream. But I love it best served cold with a big dollop of smetana.

Brilliant Jam Jars Idea

Kethry over at Urbania to Stoneheads came up with a brilliant idea for labelling jam jars - paint a square of blackboard paint on them and label them in chalk. How cool is that? It looks really smart but also home-made, and it's very practical and reusable. I bet I could beg some blackboard paint on Freecycle - there must be people who bought some for a project and then kept half a tin full of leftover paint in the shed.

Ed's Shelf

Ed made a shelf above the kitchen window, to store preserves and bottles of sloe gin etc. He did a great job, as always, and the end result is practical and really attractive. Every time I look at it I admire his handiwork, and mine, and get that wonderful smug feeling that comes from having lots of home-made preserves.

From left to right - blackberry vodka, lemon gin, 4 jars of chutney, 2 jars of cherry jam, 1 jar of mincemeat, 2 bottles of damson gin, 1 bottle of lime rum, 7 jars of damson jam and a really dreadful teapot in the shape of a bride and groom, which was a wedding present from an uncle with a mischievous sense of humour.

Smells Like A Brewery In Here...

Steph's here (I know she was just here a fortnight ago but she liked it so much she came back), so we've been busy as usual. Steph instructed Ed to make a shelf to store preserves and things, which he did (I'll show you pictures another time). We made five gallons of tea wine, five gallons of beer (from a kit, I don't know how to make beer from scratch yet but I'd love to learn). We sorted all the stored potatoes out and removed those which had become rotten. Let me tell you, rotten potatoes smell really foul. And we picked about ten pounds of mixed hedgerow fruit - damsons, elderberries, blackberries, sloes, haws and apples - to make 5 gallons of hedgerow wine.

We met our new neighbours, who told us to help ourselves to all the apples, pears, damsons and greengages we want from their garden. Another neighbour provided some empty beer and wine bottles from her recycling bin (we had to do some fancy footwork to explain why we were eyeing up her bin - she initially thought we were accusing her of crimes against recycling, or perhaps of having a drink problem). And we had a gorgeous lamb casserole with our own pink fir apple potatoes and roasted mystery summer squash, and drank lots of beer - well we'll need the bottles to bottle our own beer when it's ready!


Cartoon from climatecartoons.org. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Chutney

If I've persuaded you to try your hand at chutney, you'll need a recipe. So here's one (sort of):

Basic Chutney Method

Wash every empty jam jar you own (and go through to cupboard looking for jars that are almost empty and deciding you never liked that sort of jam anyway so you can "claim" the jar) really well, then place them upside down on a baking sheet and put in a low oven to dry out and sterilise.

Finely chop about 5lbs of vegetables (such as tomatoes, courgettes, runner beans, carrots - whatever you've got a lot of) 2 or 3 lbs of apples and one pound of onions. Put these in the largest pan you have with a pound of dried fruit of some sort (raisins, sultanas, chopped prunes, it's up to you), a pound of sugar and 1 1/2 pints of vinegar (don't use malt vinegar if you can help it or your chutney will taste of malt vinegar and not much else). Mix well and bring to a simmer.

Whilst you're going that, place a bunch of whole spices (such as a few whole cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, mace, fresh ginger, whatever you like) in a muslin cloth and tie up well, then dunk it in the chutney and let the flavours seep out.

Feeling nervous? Don't be. Chutney can't really go wrong unless you burn it. It's not like jam or a souffle - it can't fail. I promise. All you're doing is slowly cooking the ingredients down to a thick gloopy mush. You can taste it as you go along, and if you think it needs a chili kick, add some chili. If you think it's too vinegary, add a bit more sugar. Too sweet? Add more vinegar and salt.

It needs to simmer on a low heat for at least an hour or two. You don't need to stir constantly, thank God, but you can't totally desert it or it will burn. It's ready when it's thick and looks like chutney. I told you it was easy.

Now get it into the jars and screw the lids on. It needs to mature for at least a month or two. Before that it will still taste rather vinegary but after maturation it will be smooth and all the flavours will mingle together. Think of an appealing name for your chutney, and be creative - gooseberry and ginger sounds nice, but runner bean and swede isn't so alluring. So if your main ingredients are prosaic you'll have to call it something like "Taste of Autumn Relish", or "Poynton Farmhouse Chutney", or "Mel's Spicy Preserve".

It keeps forever in an unopened jar. Once you've opened it - honestly I've no idea. I've never seen a jar of homemade chutney go off, but I've never seen a jar of homemade chutney last more than a couple of weeks, so the point is moot.

Top Ten Reasons to Make Chutney

1. They taste great with cold meats, in cheese sandwiches, or with a pork pie

2. It's really easy. Honest. I know some people are preserve-phobic but there's no need to be

3. Home-made chutney makes a great Christmas present, thank-you gift, welcome-new-neighbour gift, I'm-sorry-my-bees-attacked-you-and-stung-your-dog peace offering etc.

4. Your friends and neighbours are avoiding you in case you give them any more runner beans or courgettes, but you need to use up the surplus veg somehow

5. Not everything is cheaper to make than to buy, but chutney is (especially if you're using up home-grown gluts or hedgerow forage)

6. You cannot buy anything in the shops that's nearly as good as home-made chutney

7. Have you read the ingredients label on shop-bought chutney?

8. You can get creative in so many ways - different herbs and spices in the recipe, fancy labels, little fabric hats and ribbons. It's great fun

9. They always go really well at Christmas fairs, summer fetes and other fund raising events

10. There's nothing like the feeling that a well-stocked store cupboard gives you, especially when the contents are home-made

Wine in Progress

The damson wine is now in a five-gallon fermenting bucket with an airlock fitted. It's tucked away in a corner of the living room going blup occasionally.

I've got more damsons left. I think I'll make another batch.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

The cherry jam we made yesterday needed lemon juice, and as we are very frugal and hate to see anything go to waste, we used the lemon peel to make lemon vodka. Steph found the recipe on a blog called The Cottage Smallholder, which I had never seen before but I'm really glad she found it. It's right up my street.

From the website:

About Us
We live in a pretty 16th century cottage in an English village on the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk border.The cottage cast includes three Miniature Pinscher dogs, one Maran hen, four bantams, 70,000 bees, fifty three fish and an Old English carp called George.
This diary charts our haphazard journey towards self sufficiency and beyond.

They've got bees, chickens, they forage from hedgerows - basically they sound just like us and I'm glad to add them to my blogroll. Why not pop across and read the latest entries?

Cheery Jam

Just so you don't think that we're obsessed with making booze, we also made seven jars of cherry jam today using home grown cherries from the freezer. I mislabelled one jar "Cheery Jam", and liked it so much I wrote that on all the remaining labels.

We'll be using one jar tomorrow to make Black Forest Gateau.

Review: First Steps in Winemaking

In the past I've referred to certain books as "the bible", the final word in their field. Well C.J.J. Berry's First Steps in Winemaking is undoubtedly the home winemaker's bible. I first started winemaking as a student, to knock up large batches of cheap falling-over-juice, and I've had this book ever since then. The pages are heavily annotated (and stained) and there are other recipes scribbled on scraps of paper stuffed between its pages.

The book has hundreds of recipes, organised by month. This is a really neat feature because if the winemaking mood takes you, you can easily look up what is in season at the moment. In the winter months it gives recipes for things like wheat, tinned fruit, and Ribena wine. If you're searching for a particular recipe there's an index in the back.

Berry (who in life had a really impressive moustache) teaches you not only how to make wine, but also all the "whys". By following the book I developed an understanding of winemaking which allowed me to experiment with my own brews. I think my all time top success was a 5 gallon batch of "everything the greengrocer was chucking out on Saturday afternoon", which resulted in a fabulous wine very like a good Cabernet Sauvignon. Sadly I never wrote down the proportions and so the recipe was unrepeatable. But then again Berry advised me to always keep scrupulous records for this very reason, so the fault lies with the student, not the master.

I don't have any other winemaking books and I don't feel I need any. First Steps in Winemaking has everything I need.

Sloe Gin

At the bottom of the freezer we found a bag of sloes and a bag of blackberries we picked last year. So we defrosted them and popped them in clean bottles, until the bottles were about 1/3 full. Then we covered them in sugar until the bottles were 2/3 full. Then we labelled them.

I've put them by the kettle so every time anyone makes a pot of tea they can give the bottles a shake over the next few weeks. The flavours from the berries will infuse into the sugar and result in a thick syrup which can be blended with cheap gin or vodka (the berries can be discarded - or made into fruitcake). After a few months the liqueur will be ready, but it will be even smoother if you can wait another year.

Lemon Curd

I made some lemon curd using Hedgewizard's recipe. Thanks, Hedgie, it's delicious and sooooo easy - you all must try it. Suitable for the preserve-challenged; forget massive cauldrons full of boiling hot jam, special thermometers and getting the whole kitchen covered in sticky goo. The whole process takes about 10 minutes from thinking "Hmm, maybe I'll make some lemon curd" to admiring your finished jar of golden yumminess. Plus it uses ingredients you probably have knocking around anyway - lemons, eggs, sugar, butter and cornflour. Finally, there's no problem with small batches. Just make a single jar if that's all you need.

Recipe for lemon meringue pie coming soon...

Downsize Your Fridge

There is no need to keep mustard, jam, marmalade, chutney, pickles in the fridge. These are all methods of preserving food from before fridges were invented. Unopened, they should keep almost indefinitely in a normal kitchen cupboard or other cool dark place. Once opened we all know they can eventually go mouldy, but it depends on how quickly you use them up. There's no point keeping a jar of jam in the fridge if you get through it in a couple of weeks. If you don't get through it in a couple of weeks, consider buying a smaller jar next time.

Eggs shouldn't be in the fridge, or most fruits and vegetables. Cheese and bacon are also "pre-preserved" foods, although before the invention of fridges they would have been stored in pantries or meat lockers built of stone or with thick walls, sometimes underground or at least on the shadiest side of the house and painstakingly protected from rodents and flies. I store my meat and cheese in the fridge, but whenever I put anything in there I always remove any bulky packaging first. There's no point spending money on electricity to keep loads of plastic and cardboard cool, and anyway it makes more space for food.

Experiment to find which produce really needs refrigerating, and what will keep just as well in a cupboard. Maybe you can downsize to a smaller, more energy efficient, fridge.

Interview with Andy and Dave from Selfsufficientish.com

One of my favourite websites is selfsufficientish.com, the fabulous online resource for urban self-sufficiency run by twin brothers Dave and Andy Hamilton. They both agreed to answer my questions about self sufficiency.

Bean-Sprouts: How did you first get interested in self-sufficiency?

Andy: As a child I remember making nettle soup and picking blackberries. We also had some apple trees in the back garden and a small veggie patch. As I have got older it has been more about asking myself "Can I do that instead of buying it?" When the answer is yes - whether it be growing my own veggies or making a fridge - then I will give it a go. For me it is about under-consumption, trying to live as gently on the planet as possible. Food miles make up for a lot of the carbon emissions and by growing my own and promoting growing your own I believe this can make a difference to the amount of fuel used.

Dave: My childhood experiences were of course very similar to Andy’s. Not long after living at home I moved to a house with rhubarb and nettles growing in abundance in the back yard. The garden was tiny but I was still amazed by the amount I got from these two crops without having to do very much (not even sowing the seed). Some years after that I experimented with growing some herbs then branched out to growing potatoes. The following year I was living in Oxford and had my first full size garden veggie patch. Despite the garden being over shadowed by trees on all sides I got a bumper crop of carrots, courgettes, parsnips, potatoes and in the following spring purple sprouting broccoli. This soon got me hooked and I launched into a two year experiment of growing the majority of my own food. This was a partial success as I managed to put something on the table every day for a year. Since then I have always grown something and am constantly improving my wild food knowledge.


Bean-Sprouts: What are you totally self-sufficient in?

Andy: I am totally self-sufficient in some herbs such as chives, rosemary, parsley and fennel. This year I am going to up the ante and introduce some more of the lesser grown herbs such as hyssop and chervil.
Last summer I was almost totally self sufficient in vegetables. My food bill for myself and my girlfriend was around £5 a week. It would have been well into the springtime this year if my freezer had not packed up, although I still have beetroot both stored and pickled and a load of jam. I am moving towards self-sufficiency in booze also, with a brew on the go almost all of the time and some stored up. I would say that every week of the year I have something that I have grown. I hope to store a lot more this year so that every meal I can have at least one thing on my plate that I have grown. I also tend to forage for mushrooms and other wild foods. If I find the time I dry my mushrooms, which keep for about a year.
It depends on what you call self sufficient for other areas in my life as I cook all my meals from scratch, own a bike not a car and mend clothes instead of buying new ones. I intend to make a solar hot water heater and solar ovens when the weather picks up. I hope to be self-sufficient in hot water for washing up and for some meals as a result.

Dave: It depends on the time of year for me. By the end of this month (March) I will be self-sufficient in salad greens and this year have planted enough fruit to be self-sufficient between at least June and October. This is my first year on my allotment in Bristol so all going well it will be from summer this year then ongoing that I will be self-sufficient in most of my food. I decided not to buy seed trays this year as I am recycling old yogurt pots, mushroom and drinks containers for my seedlings so I am also self-sufficient in those. Similarly I would have made enough compost to be self-sufficient in that soon. I intend to build a shed from scrap material at the allotment and will be harvesting rain water from the roof for my crops. I’m also reusing my bath water at home in my third floor flat for my seedlings.
A handful of other things myself and Andy do to be a little more self-sufficient (or self-sufficientish)
· A by-weekly forage in Bristol (sometimes more often in mushroom season)
· Both of us own a solar phone charger
· My desk top computer is made from salvaged parts.
· Andy makes bikes from salvaged parts
· Making own cleaning products
· Re-cycling and re-using everything possible!


Bean-Sprouts: What was your goal in setting up selfsufficientish.com?

Andy: No real goal as it were; we just wanted to share our experiences with others. I guess the closest to a goal would be the ideology of selfsufficientish, which is to reduce your impact on the planet by doing as much yourself as you can.

Dave: I very much saw the website as something that went hand in hand with what I wanted to do. My eventual goal has always been living in a self-sufficient environment and I saw the website as a way of sharing what could be done whilst living within the constraints of every day life. At the time I was a student living in a shared rented house and as most students are I was completely skint. Rather than let this limit me I decided it would be good to share the experiences I had in my chosen lifestyle. It was also a virtual way of sharing ideas.


Bean-Sprouts: What advice would you give someone just starting out in "greening" their lifestyle?

Dave: Don’t look at all the things you can’t do and let it put you off but see all the things you can no matter how small they might be. The first easy example that is always used is to change your light bulbs to energy savers as this is a sure fire way to cut down on carbon and reduce your electricity bill. Other tips are to put backs on your curtains to conserve heat, re-use your bath water in the garden or with houseplants, grow your own salad leaves or herbs on a windowsill. In short try and see what you do from day to day and see if there is a greener alternative – there usually is if you look for it.

Andy: I could not agree more with Dave on this question. Although I would add don’t fly to the list. I am off on holiday to Germany soon by train – my girlfriend is flying and I shall meet her there. I am not saying this makes me a better person, if I was some kind of eco-saint then I would not even use the train and instead cycle everywhere. I do think that we fly too much and even if you don’t think that man is changing the climate, flying still pollutes more than a train does.


Bean-Sprouts: What does the future hold for selfsufficientish.com?

Andy: We have just recently signed up with Hodder and Stoughton to write a book. It was not what we intended when we first started, but is very welcome. We hope that we can extend our message to much wider audience. We hope that it will be a book that you will be able to turn to whenever you want to do anything selfsufficientish. So it will cover topics from jam making, foraging and vegetable growing but also cover ethical shopping and how to make do and mend. We don’t want it to be another book that tells you that you are living your life un-environmentally, its not going to be written to give anyone a lecture. Instead we hope that people will be inspired to make small changes that make a real difference. We hope it to be the book that every selfsufficientisher, in fact everyone, will find invaluable. If you live on a small holding and have tons of spare time or in a bedsit and work all the hours God sends then you will find something you can do in this book. The book is called the selfsufficientish bible and is out in May 2008.



Thanks a lot, Dave and Andy. Good luck with the book, I'll look forward to that coming out.

Review: Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables

I cannot for the life of me think why Her Majesty's Stationery Office would bother to produce (with the aid of the Women's Institute) a book about jam making. It's one of those quirky little things that makes me glad to be British. But they did - in several editions from the 1930s onwards, and an excellent book it is too.

Mine is the 1989 edition which covers jams, jellies, marmalades, fruit cheeses and butters, mincemeat, bottling, canning and pickling amongst other methods of preservation. The many recipes are excellent, but the outstanding thing about this book is the detailed instructions. Everything is explained - the different ways food can spoil and how preservation techniques foil this, which technique works best with different varieties of fruits and vegetables, how to choose the best produce for preserving rather than eating fresh, exact storage conditions, how to present preserves for competitions, and so on.

Don't expect sumptuous photographs a la Nigella or other modern gastro-porn. Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables contains only a very few black and white pencil sketches, demonstrating how to use an upturned kitchen stool as an improvised jelly strainer, for example. This is a practical how-to which has already stood the test of time. Although it is now sadly out of print you can often find used copies on eBay or Amazon marketplace, or if you're lucky in charity shops or second-hand bookshops.

I have other books which include instructions and recipes for jam making - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books, for example or Food From Your Garden - but this is the only book I have specifically about preserving, and it is the only one I need.

Pumpkin Cake

Do you remember the monster pumpkin we were so kindly given at the beginning of November? I'm sure it was left on our plot for Hallowe'en, but we didn't pick it up until a few days later, so it was too late to carve into a lantern. Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

We kept it - pumpkins store very well as long as they are not damaged and are kept cool and safe from rodents. Ours stored on top of the fridge for over 2 months, and then one day last week I cut it up and made it into lots of pumpkin puree and froze it in batches.

What will the puree be used for? Well pumpkin soup is an obvious possibility. There are lots of good recipes here - my favourite is the coconut chili and pumpkin soup. I also make a cracking pumpkin pie. But recently I've found some more surprising uses for pumpkin. For one thing, I found a recipe for a delicious moist cake made with pumpkin (pictured) which all the children will eat! It has vegetables in it, but they eat it anyway. God bless Harry Potter, that's what I say. And I've invented pumpkin griddle cakes. They're scrummy. So scrummy in fact that I'm quite relieved the kids won't countenance them - that leaves more for Ed and me.

Pumpkin Griddle Cakes
Simmer 1lb pumpkin pieces in a little water, strain and lightly mash with a fork. Make sure you strain them well, squeezing a bit if need be to remove excess water. Melt 2oz butter into the mashed pumpkin and mix well. Mix salt, pepper and grated nutmeg into the buttery pumpkin mash, then stir in 4oz wholemeal plain flour. This makes a sort of sticky dough. Heat a frying pan and grease it with a little butter. Using your fingers make a few walnut-sized pieces of pumpkin dough and drop them onto the frying pan. Fry until golden on one side (only about a minute if the pan is hot enough) then turn over, and squash them down a bit with the back of a spatula to make flattened cakes about 1/4" or so thick. Fry until golden on that side, then remove from the pan and keep them warm whilst you cook the remaining batches of pumpkin griddle cakes. Serve hot.

Self-Sufficiency Library

I must start with a confession. I copied the idea for this post from another blog. I saw the original post a while ago but I can't find it now. If the person who originally blogged about their own self-sufficiency library would like to mail me I'll gladly attribute and link.

Here are a few of the books I find useful and inspiring. It's not an exhaustive list, there are certainly other books scattered around the house I could have included. Over the next few weeks I'll review some of them.

.

Oh, and if any publishers would like to send me books for review, I'd be very glad to receive them. I'll also review CDs, chocolate, and bottles of wine.

Chutney Tasting

The two batches of chutney I made earlier (one by myself and one with Steph) have had long enough to mature, so I cracked them open for a taste today. They're good. Not too vinegary or too sweet, nice thick texture and a complex flavour. Surprisingly they both taste pretty much the same, which is odd because they have totally different ingredients. I guess chutney just tastes like chutney, whatever you make it from.

Conkers

It's that time of year again when all British mothers of sons (and some mothers of daughters) have pockets full of conkers. The fruit of the horse chestnut tree, conkers are inedible hard nuts a couple of inches in diameter. British boys love to thread them onto strings and take turns to smash an opponents conker with their own. They keep count of the battles their conker has won, and high-tally conkers can exchange hands in the playground for lavish amounts of sweets or trading cards.

Serious devotees know that a conker which has been stored for a year will be much harder than a new season's conker, but few are patient enough to wait. So they resort to artificial aging techniques, such as soaking in vinegar or baking in the oven. British mothers know this well. Painting your conker with matt varnish, or worse, drilling it out and filling it with epoxy resin is considered cheating, and therefore you're better off asking your dad for help with these.

Soft Cheese

I mentioned that you can make soft cheese out of yogurt. It's ridiculously easy. You can use skimmed milk to make a low-fat version, or gold-top to make an extra-creamy version, and of course it can be organic if you like. If you use goat's milk it will be goat's cheese.

You can also have fun adding herbs, garlic, or any other flavourings you like. Lots of freshly ground black pepper is nice (I really mean lots and lots so you get a distinct hot peppery taste), or shredded smoked salmon. Chives or finely sliced spring onions are also good. I've never tried it with little shrimps, but you can buy cottage cheese with shrimps so I'm sure it would work.

Yogurt Soft Cheese

Line a colander with a clean non-fluffy cloth and pour in a pint of home-made plain yogurt mixed with two teaspoons of ground sea salt. Fold the cloth over the top and put something heavy on top - I use a cast-iron pan full of water. You want to squeeze all the whey out of the yogurt. Leave it overnight on the draining board, then wring the yogurt in the cloth. Clear liquid will come out. When thick white creamy bits start coming through the holes in the cloth you know you have wrung enough. Scrape the thick yogurt cheese off the cloth into a container. Now you can add any flavourings you want, and keep it in the fridge.

Use it just as you would use any soft cheese such as Philadelphia. I like it spread on crackers with a slice of tomato or cucumber.