I wish I had another topic for you today instead of more adventures with vegetables. I tell you, it's like The Good Life in this house. Don't be surprised if you hear that I'm building a generator out of old lawnmower parts & sticky backed plastic, or indeed weaving scratchy green suits from homespun nettles! Actually, if I start going down that road, do intervene.....I will need stopping for my own good!
It's been all about courgettes recently. I've been putting them on top of spicy hot home-made pizzas, slipping them into curries, roasting them & tossing into bulghur wheat salads, bunging them in stir-fries, but sill they come! Courgette chutney isn't really one of my favourites, so I decided to pickle some. Found a couple of recipes I liked & concocted a mash-up of the two. It seems to have worked really well & will be good with BBQs, pulled pork, etc.
The other big croppers waiting in the wings to strike are our apples & pears. The winds this week have resulted in a lot of early windfall apples, which I've made into apple sauce for the freezer, & am half-way into making another bucketful into apple & mint jelly.
I've boiled up the fruit & mint sprigs, added the cider vinegar & it's currently dripping through the jellybag, ready for jamming tomorrow. I completely love the word 'jellybag'. It's totally wasted on a humble piece of muslin. Perhaps it should be recategorized as a personal name? You know, for those parents looking for something that bit unusual? I will make a box of my whisky truffles for any of my friends prepared to name their child 'Jellybag' - & no, you can't just pretend so as to get the truffles!
Well, I'd love to say that my jellybaggery this morning has made impressive inroads into the apple crop, but it would be a fib or the first order. Let me show you our tree:
Almost scarily full of apples, & that's only about a quarter of the tree. I couldn't fit it all in the picture. Apple chutney, apple & ginger chutney, apple muffins......recipes are stacking up ready for the onslaught. And when the apples are under control, look at these........
....loads of lovely pears! Pear chutney, Pear & cinnamon cake.......pickled pears maybe? Though I'm the only person who eats them.....but I could successfully offload a few jars onto my Dad, who is usefully for me at this time of year, a food hoover in the same league as Albert Whiskers! We have a greengage tree too, which only crops when it feels like it. This year, it felt like it, but thankfully I've already dealt with those - 13 jars of scrummy jam packed away into the pantry,
Albert Whiskers continues to get his paws well & truly under the table. I find cat body language fascinating. Let's face it, it isn't usually all that subtle, but previous cats we have owned have managed a little more nuanced approach than Albert Whiskers.
A brief guide to Albert Whiskers' body language:
* Gluing himself to human leg = Where's my food?
* Licking elbows = Where's my food?
* Jumping onto laptop keyboard & meowing into human's face = Where's my food?
* Bouncing on bed attempting to extract reclining human with actual claws = Where's my food?
* Grabbing human's foot with both sets of front paws while applying teeth = Where's my food?
* Lying in a long sausage across the front door at his big hairy human's home time = She hasn't given me my dinner. P.S Where's my food?
* Staring long & hard at the BBQ while purring like a helicopter = There seems to be an awful lot on there for just the two of you. Where's my food?
* Following human around the house & garden keeping distance below 30cm at all times while emitting increasingly desperate vocal barrage = You have two minutes to fill my bowl before I phone Ban Ki-moon to demand an emergency air drop of food aid parcels over Farndon (Call yourself a cat lover....bloody disgraceful)
Yep, this boy loves his food! I think he may have survived some of his time as a stray by begging scraps at kitchen windows. It's very noticeable that if he's outside when I open a window, he stops what he's doing & races to the window meowing. Old habits die hard. He does this even if he's just snarfed an entire pouch of fish stink with a hefty biscuit chaser.
He's cute though!
Till next time......Oh, & I gather I may have 'been organised' into doing my '5 miles without moaning' walking challenge by then, so it'll either be a result & a tick on my '50 things' list, or I will have moaned spectacularly & will have had to set another date for it.
Thanks for all the positive comments I've had about my blog via Facebook, etc. It's had well over 1000 views now, so there are obviously a few people out there who enjoy (or are grimly fascinated or perhaps choosing to self-stultify on a weekly basis) the whole cat/vegetables thing.
C x
No comments:
Post a Comment