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So at the weekend we made elderflower champagne for no better reason than the fact that the hedgerows are absolutely dripping elder flowers at the moment.
Plus I’d always fancied it.
It turns out it’s actually quite easy. We cleaned out [...]

The brew, just before the lid went on (don’t worry - we’re not keeping it either beside the radiator, or on the carpet)
There’s a monster in the kitchen of which we’ve rapidly lost control. We decided to start brewing beer this weekend. It was a four-dayer, after all. So we got ourselves a fermenter, which [...]

Back at the house tonight I found the builder had been in and finished off the floors. That’s it. The end of the indoor builders jobs. The only thing that needs doing now is the shed, which is an outdoor job and will be done on Friday.
I had assumed that the builder would - naturally [...]

Sloe gin, slowly turning pink
I’m quite impressed by the rapid pinking of the sloe gin. It obviously needs more shaking than I’m giving it, as Rich’s sloe gin and Andrew’s sloe vodka are both much redder than mine, but after just a week in the cupboard this is already a fairly gratifying colour. Roll on [...]

Sloes in the bottle
There are half a dozen blackthorn trees in the horses’ field, absolutely covered with sloe. There is very little you can do with sloes, as they’re so bitter, apart from bottle them with gin and wait for them to ferment.
So over the weekend we headed out with mud-proof shoes and carrier bags, [...]

Quince Jelly
The tomatoes really are coming on quicker than we can manage now. You can take off a dozen new fruits every day, and still have another dozen to do the next day. We’ve run out of things we can make with them.
So this weekend we’ve been picking and eating them, mainly in sandwiches, and [...]

What do you do with 6kg of tomatoes that need using sooner rather than later? Chutney, of course.
Unfortunately the onion crop hasn’t come to much, so we bought a dozen medium-sized bulbs, and sliced them and the tomatoes into a large jam pan, then set them to reduce at a medium heat.

Now we were led [...]

Beetroot cake
We were shopping in Ilva a few weeks back and ended up in the cafe where they were selling Beetroot cake. Knowing that we had beetroot growing in the garden we passed it by in favour of scones, swearing to make our own when they were grown.
So today we did. A quick Googlage showed [...]

Something nasty has happened to our water at home, and now it has a yucky plastic taste like it’s been laminated. Sometimes it comes out of the tap milky white, sometimes clear, and you never really know what your tea is going to taste like until you’ve made it, sipped it and poured it away [...]

All our worst fears confirmed. Cakes make you fat and some people are so ignorant to the fact that we now need to print health warnings on flapjack wrappers.