Rhubarb & Ginger Jam

Having sorted the chest freezer out, decided it was time to crack on and use up some of the fruit. Rhubarb and ginger jam sounded good to me!

2lb rhubarb, chopped

2lb sugar

juice of 2 lemons

40g ginger

Makes 3 jars.

OK, so I've mixed Imperial and metric measurements. I'm useless with metric measurements. We found some frozen ginger in Sainsburys, and it's conveniently squished into 20g blocks, so used two of those, and it's easier to simply use the known metric weights than try and convert them.

Anyway, to make the jam, we put the chopped rhubarb and the sugar into a bowl and left it overnight for the rhubarb juices to absorb the sugar. All the recipes we looked at said to do this, but some for 2 hours, some for 24 hours. I decided overnight was enough, and gave it a stir before bed. I gave it another stir first thing in the morning, by which time, the rhubarb was in a lovely sugary syrup.

I then put some jam jars in the dishwasher and when that finished, put them in the oven at gas mark 1 to keep them hot - putting hot jam into a cold jam jar isn't a good idea (apparently!).

I then put the jam on the heat, bringing it to a boil. I added the ginger and lemon juice while it was heating up. I haven't yet found out how much juice is in one lemon, so I just poured a few tablespoons of Jif lemon juice in.

After about 20 minutes, I tested if it had reached the setting point by dropping a small blob of jam onto a cold saucer and testing if it wrinkled when pushed. It didn't seem to wrinkle easily, so kept the jam on the gas a bit longer. I tested again, but still wasn't sure, so I took a chance and stopped the boiling, and poured the jam into the hot jam jars and put the lids on.

When it had cooled down, I tried the jam - it was a bit too thick, but ok. Maybe too much lemon juice? It wasn't as gingery as I'd hoped for, so might double the ginger next time.

Plum Crumble

Pickled Onions - Part 1

Some of the onions didn't grow much - barely worth the effort of peeling, slicing and cooking - so decided to pickle them! And they are the perfect size too!

We have some red and some yellow, so we're going to pickle some of each. Having looked at various pickled onion recipies, we're going to pickle some in pickling vinegar and some in malt vinegar with a mix of spices.

We topped, tailed and peeled the first batch of onions and put the in a bowl of salty water, using a small plate to push the onions below the water. The salty water apparently helps to partially separate the layers in the onions, which helps to let the pickling spices penetrate the whole onion. We left them there for 24 hours before rinsing and drying them.

Once dry, we put the onions into two jars. We re-use old jars rather than buying new: we don't like waste, old jars are perfectly fine so long as they're cleaned and sterilised. One jar is an Uncle Ben's jar, the other was a Sainsbury's jam jar - we chose these as they were the right size for all the onions we'd prepared. Both were washed in the dishwasher and then sterilised with some boiling water. We then packed the onions into the two jars.

For the first batch of onions, we chose to use Sarson's pickling vinegar, partially because it's one of those on the list to try, and partially to save time on preparation. We poured the pickling vinegar in to the jars, filling both to the top, then put the lids on. Job done! And here they are:

These will stay in the cupboard for a couple of months or so before we try them. We'll do the next batch soon ...

More Carrot Sowings

Another 2 tubs of Early Nantes carrots sown today.

Herbs

We have started some herbs for indoor growing over the winter. We are starting some in the greenhouse too, to see how they cope over the winter. It doesn't matter if they fail as we have plenty more seeds to sow more in the spring.

Sowings so far:
2 Chives
2 Coriander Cilantro
2 Red Basil
2 Russian Tarragon
4 Thyme Old English
4 Sage

We've also sown a cell tray of:
8 Mint
8 Red Basil
8 Sweet Basil

We'll need to sow a lot more herbs sometime soon. We're planning to have lots of sage plants in tubs in between all the brassicas next year - apparently these help keep the cabbage white's off the brassicas - we don't want the veggies ruined by caterpillars!

Reminder - we must look up "companion planting" - the art of planting one thing with something else to ward off pests!