Pumpkin Celebration!

Pumpkin Celebration 

25th October 3 - 6pm

Come and join us for this event celebrating the pumpkin 

and all the delicious and fun things you can do with it!

Birthday Work and Apples!

Today turned out to be Tracey's birthday which was good on 2 counts - happy education worker and... cake! Even more exciting for us was the fact that she managed to pop some of the popcorn we grew this year, and it tastes great - much better than shop bought!

Our own popcorn!

As well as the eating, there was quite a bit of gardening. We started to tidy up all of the beds to prepare for the ending of the growing season and to spruce the place up a bit for our Pumpkin Celebration. This also meant that we realised some of the radish rats were still nice - these are the pods on radishes that have gone to seed. For each radish, you get about 40 - 50 pods, so it's worth letting them seed and getting a bigger crop. Some of us prefer them to the radish.

Hassan tries a radish pod - Joyce isn't so sure

Andrea is quickly proving to be an indispensable member of the team - and got a good morning's work under her belt before we had a lunch of fried green tomatoes with mayonnaise and chopped onion, followed by "the cake". 

Andrea gets stuck in to clear up

Then we had a bit of excitement as we headed off to Lenton Library to harvest their apple tree. We'll be using these to create our apple juice at the Pumpkin Celebration on Saturday 25th, and we're delighted that the Library staff are willing to part with these lovely apples.

Lenton Library's lovely apple tree

We got a nice big crop off the tree, although there are still more if you have a really long handled picker.

Hassan with some of the harvest

Even the telescopic pickers we took weren't tall enough for the tree! Still the team did a great job, and we picked up a bag of windfalls for the neighbour's horse.

Andrea and Amir using the long-handled
apple pickers

Sibel, one of our previous volunteers joined us for the day, and found an apple so perfect that looked like it had been sculpted rather than grown. Hopefully they will all taste as good as the ones we tried on site!

Sibel found the perfect apple

Preserving - with friends

It was great to welcome our friends from Gateway to Nature again today, for a session on preserving. It also meant an outing for Tracey's fabulous "apple slinky maker". These were first made in the 1880s, (see here for details), but if you want one today, you can just nip down to Lakeland and buy one - pretty much exactly like the original design!

The famous apple slinky maker

Apple slinky!

We love making jams and chutneys at Windmill, as well as drying, fermenting and making cordials, so we like to share the knowledge when we can. Today we covered green tomato chutney, sauerkraut,  plum jam and apple butter. We also did a Mexican themed lunch, to take advantage of all the lovely beans we've just podded at the end of the season. Everyone enjoyed refried beans with fresh tomato salsa and quesadillas (i.e. flour tortillas with melted cheese in between them - to easy to post a recipe!).

Stirring up the chutney

Potting up - a jam funnel really helps

Whilst we were chopping and stirring, Hassan, Chris and Andrea got on with the job of preparing the garden for the end of the season, taking out weeds and removing the last of the Shark's Fin Melons - we've had a huge crop this year, so if anyone would like some, let us know. We were also delighted to be joined by Mac, from Kimberley and by  Brian who managed to come along for a little while to have a think about how he will improve the wood shed. 

Hassan shows why Shark's Fin Melons do so well.
Look at that root!

Shark's Fin Melons from the harvest - these are the small ones!

All the recipes we did are below. We hope you will enjoy making them as much as we did!

Green Tomato Chutney

Ingredients

3lb green tomatoes

1lb onions

2.5lbs apples - peel and chop into 1cm cubes or smaller

1lb demerara sugar (can add a small amount of dark brown sugar to ordinary white to get the same effect more cheaply).

1 pint vinegar (I prefer cider vinegar, but almost any vinegar will work).

½ lb sultanas or raisins (rinse in hot water to remove any taste of rancid oil).

1tsp cayenne (this can be reduced or increased to taste)

1 tsp ground ginger

(can also add coriander seed to add a lemony kick).

Method

Chop tomatoes and onions into roughly 1cm cubes. Sprinkle with salt and leave overnight then drain and rinse in morning. (I usually leave this step out, with good results, but it will make the chutney sweeter if that is what you prefer).

Put in a large preserving pan with a heavy base. Add the chopped apples, sugar, vinegar, raisins and the spices.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 2 hours.

Cooking up the chutney - stir regularly to prevent it sticking

Pot up in jars with screw-top lids with a rubber seal, for the longest life, put a wax disk on top of the chutney before sealing it.

Plum or Damson Jam

Ingredients 

5lbs damson or plum flesh

5lbs sugar

1/2 pint water

knob of butter

Method 

Wash and stone the fruit. Put 1/2 pint of water and fruit into a jam pan or other large heavy-based saucepan.

Bring to the boil and simmer until the fruit breaks up and makes lots of liquid (takes about 1/2 an hour as long as you keep the pot out of the wind!). Don't worry if there are a few lumps left. If you don't have much time or hand problems, it's ok to just boil up the whole fruit, though you will need to skim off the stones. In that case, take off about ½ lb in your calculation of the weight of fruit.

Fishing for stones - actually quite a fun job if you make
it a competition!

Add the sugar and a knob of butter - this helps stop a build up of foam on top of the jam. Stir until you can't feel the sugar on the bottom any more, then taste it, because the fruit can vary a lot in acidity depending on how ripe it is. You can add up to another pound of sugar if necessary. Now bring it back to the boil and boil hard for about 10-15 minutes.

Then test for a set - put a few drops of jam onto a china plate, let it cool slightly then push it with your finger. If the surface forms wrinkles, the jam is ready. Turn off the heat and ladle the jam into sterilized jars. Keep some bread ready to wipe the last scrapings of jam off the pan and make sure to eat it!

NB - If your saucepan is smaller than a jam pan, make sure you don't overload it, or the jam may boil over. The pan shouldn't really be more than 2/3rds full once the fruit and sugar are added. Boiling jam can cause severe burns and should be handled with care.

Refried beans

Ingredients

 1lb / 450g fresh podded beans, 1 mug dried or 2 cans of beans

1 large onion

ground cumin to taste

Method

Prepare the beans as necessary – for fresh, just add water to cover, bring to the boil and simmer until soft. For dried, soak the beans overnight then boil and simmer as above. Or just open the tins and drain the beans.  Once soft, mash the beans with a potato masher.

(NB. Don’t add salt as it makes the skins tough).

Mashing the beans

Finely chop the onion and sweat in around 1 tablespoon of olive oil until soft. Add around 2 teaspoons cumin and stir in (you can add more if liked). Add the mashed beans and a little salt to taste. Stir in and heat through.

Tomato Salsa

Ingredients 

1lb / 450g tomatoes

1 mild onion

Juice of 1 lemon or lime

Small bunch coriander leaves

Salt to taste

Method

Juice the lemon or lime. Chop all other ingredients and mix. Add juice and salt to taste. Serve with refried beans and cheesy tortillas for a hearty lunch.

Adding lemon juice to taste

 

All Curcubits Great and Small.

Sometimes you discover things when you have a tidy up. We tried growing cucamelons (or mouse melons) this year, and thought the crop had failed, but when we tidied, we found we had one solitary melon! The plants we grew from seed all grew well, and those we gave to other people bore quite a few fruits, so we think the problem may be to do with temperature. The successful gardeners all had glass houses with a brick base, which would be warmer at night than our polytunnel. We suspect that we were scuppered by the cool August, and that adding some plastic bottles of water around the plants or other heat storing devices might solve the problem in future years. For the record, we cut it up into tiny bits, and it tasted wonderful - really nice cucumber flavour with a hint of citrus.

One lonely little melon!

Just as a contrast, we met some of the larger members of the curcubit family when Barbara from Bulwell Forest Garden arrived to donate some pumpkins for our up-coming Pumpkin Celebration. Thanks BFG - we promise we'll make something lovely with them and let you have them back afterwards!

Barbara with BFG's gift of pumpkins

Today we also did a lot of harvesting of chickpeas, which are a bit fiddly, but taste great. This is probably not a crop to grow to save money, but it is fun. The pods pop wonderfully, and fresh chickpeas taste really nice from the pod, and don't go mealy like peas do as they get older. They also seem to manage with almost no watering, and weren't too bothered by our cold August. We just use chickpeas from the shops as seed, since they are vastly cheaper than from seed companies, and we found that they last for several years before the germination rate falls.

Freshly podded chickpeas

Of course, once you have the chickpeas, you might as well use them for something delicious. We made a ratatouille from our last aubergine, courgettes, onions, garlic and tomatoes and added in the chickpeas along with a good handful of fresh basil and oregano (recipe below). It was lovely with bread and grated cheese - the perfect allotment lunch!

Ratatouille about to disappear.

Joyce enjoys the fruits of her labour.

We also did a lot of tidying and weeding in the sensory garden. Joyce and Brian worked hard to make the area around the memorial bench look good, whilst new volunteer Andrea, along with Tracey and Hassan did stirling work digging up the sensory bed, which had rather too many thistles and buttercups. Thanks to all of you!

Joyce and Brian trimming the hedge

Andrea gets stuck into digging

Ratatouille with fresh chickpeas

Ingredients

1 medium aubergine (firm ones will be sweeter - no need to salt)
1 medium courgette
500g / 1lb tomatoes (fully ripe - the tastier the tomatoes, the better it will taste)
1 onion
1 large clove of garlic
tomato puree to taste (if the tomatoes aren't strong enough tasting)
handful chopped basil
small bunch oregano - leaves removed and shredded

Chop onions and garlic and sweat in a little olive oil until softened.
Add chopped courgette and aubergine. Cook for a minute and then turn off the heat and put the lid on so it can soften whilst you chop the tomatoes.
The tomatoes may be skinned if you prefer - just drop them in boiling water for 10 seconds, then move them to a basin of cold water and the skin will come off easily. Otherwise, chop finely to avoid finding large bits of skin in the stew.
Add tomatoes and increase the heat until the stew is bubbling. Add chopped oregano. Simmer for 15 - 30 minutes, until all the ingredients are soft and the flavours have mingled. If stew is a little watery, add some tomato puree. Add basil just before serving and stir through. We eat this with cheese, so we don't find the need to add salt.