Sunday 20 December 2009

It's all happening at M & J's this week

Phew!  It's all happening here at the moment! Today I

  • made brambleberry cordial - cheated by using the steam juicer to make the juice. MUCH easier than fiddling with muslin bags etc, and the chickens are overjoyed with the leftover berry pulp

  • made cherry chutney - it's SO tedious pitting 2kg of cherries - but when it's $8 for 2kg of seconds you need to just do it :)
  • finished making the raspberry vinegar
  • made rapsberry jam (Jerry picked 900g yesterday! it's a bumper berry year)
  • sorted my garlic and hung the good cloves in bunches to dry further. The ones that won't keep we will eat first
  • made a jar of pickled garlic
Doesn't look like much, but that took care of 5 hours this morning.

Meanwhile the great pantry renovation started this week. We're extending our laundry/pantry/utility room into where Jerry's wardrobes are to give us more food (and general) storage space, as well as space for a bigger chest freezer, given that we now buy almost all our meat in bulk. The first stage meant moving ALL Jerry's clothes, and all the food and jars from the pantry out of their respective homes. That took us from this:

to this:
Of course, all the bottles and jars of stuff had to go somewhere...so my new pantry is now down the other end of the house. It's going to be a bit chaotic for a few weeks until it all gets done, but it will mean so much more storage. Most of Jerry's clothes are now in either "my" wardrobe, or in a temporary wardrobe.

Luckily our guests between Xmas and New Year spent about 6 months living out of a trailer-tent whilst touring Australia, so I'm hoping this means they won't feel too claustrophobic with all this clutter at "their" end of the house!

5 comments:

Aussiemade said...

Wow Margo you really have been busy! Curious how did you use a steamer for your cordial?

Margo said...

Hi Aussiemade,

I used the steam juicer to juice the berries - the other option is to put hte berries in a pan with a bit of water and simmer gently until very soft, then train through a muslin bag to draw off hte juice.

Then you add the sugar and make the cordial as normal. Here's my post with that version of the recipe http://margoandjerry.blogspot.com/search/label/cordial

Anonymous said...

M&J, A note pre-Christmas to thank you for the blog and the information provided. If you look at http://hyamsbeach.org/day/ you will detect your influence in the garden and preserving.
Have a restful break and please keep blogging.
Ihian

E said...

We only *just* finished the cordial you gave us. It was very special, so used sparingly. Very delicious with caronated water I must say! :)

Margo said...

Hi Ihian - thanks for that lovely comment! I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday period. Love the photos on your blog!

Glad you like the cordial E!

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