Tag Archives: Kitchen Gardeners’ Society

February’s preserve and jam workshop

Posted on March 5, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The workshop was great fun and Emma and Kerrin’s house smelt absolutely divine.  We made 20 jars of jam – half plum, other half nectarine and mango, and 20 jars of Emma’s summer pickle.

Master jam stirer

 

If you’d like to make your own jam, here’s how you do it:

Elizabeth’s great-nana’s failsafe jam

Ingredients

  •  Quantity of soft fruit (plums, strawberries, apricots, peaches…)
  •  Equal quantity by mass of sugar.
  •  Juice of a lemon.
  •  Commercial pectin (quantity by weight, one packet of Jam Setta to 1.5kg fruit)

Method

  •  Wash your fruit and cut it into equal-sized pieces, removing any stones, spots or yucky bits.
  •  Weigh your fruit.
  •  Weigh an equal amount of sugar, mix your pectin through this and set it aside.
  • At this point put your jars and lids in the oven at 100 deg to sterilise them.
  •  Put fruit in a large, heavy-bottomed pot on a very low heat.
  •  Let the fruit simmer very slowly until it is cooked.  This step is important, as once you add your sugar the fruit doesn’t cook any further.
  •  Once the fruit is cooked, add your sugar and increase the heat to a rolling boil.
  •  Boil about 10 minutes, then start to test for setting point.
  •  Once your jam has reached setting point, take if off the heat.  Let jam sit for 10 minutes or so, until the fruit no longer rises to the surface.  This will ensure that when you bottle it, the chunks of fruit are evenly distributed through the jar.
  •  Bottle, seal and label.
  •  Stand back and feel pleased with yourself.

Notes

  •  Pectin is the naturally occurring acid in fruit that aids in setting.
  •  Slightly under-ripe fruit is best for jam as it tends to contain more pectin.
  •  I usually guess with the amount of Jam Setta I use, depending on the type of fruit and its degree of ripeness.  It’s forgiving stuff.
  •  This recipe works for just about any soft fruit – the only failure I’ve ever had with it was with custard apple, and that was because it tends to be gritty.
  •  Setting point is the point at which the fruit soup changes its chemical consistency to a gel.
  • To test setting point, put a saucer in the freezer. When the fruit has been boiling for 10 minutes or so, put a smear on the cold saucer, put it back in the freezer to cool down quickly, then run your finger gently through it.   When the jam creases, it’s at setting point. You might need to do this a couple of times.  If you leave it past this you end up with toffee.

Summer Pickle 

If you’d like to try the summer pickle, you can download the recipe here.

Pickle prep

Furious chopping

Successful pickle

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In case you missed it – preserving the harvest

Posted on November 4, 2012 by | 1 Comment

There was rain, there was thunder and lightning and squally wind.  It was a dose of winter at the end of Spring, and it was NOT going to stop the Kitchen Gardeners holding their Preserving the Harvest workshop.

The plan had been to make marmalade, lemon curd, lemon cordial, tomato passata and Moroccan preserved lemons.  Well, four out of five is pretty good.

Tomatoes, ready for processing

We managed to process something like 30kg of tomatoes into passata, flavoured with garlic, thyme and oregano.

We also made up a dozen or so jars of Debra’s microwave lemon curd (recipe at the end) and two batches of marmalade using Elizabeth’s Great-Nana’s guaranteed recipe (recipe also following).  Debra also made just enough lemon cordial for us all to try.

Sadly, we just didn’t get to the Moroccan lemons.  There was a bit of a jar issue and, well, we just ran out of time.  What with having to try two different kinds of marmalade, some experimental kiwifruit jam and the lemon curd on Peter’s turkish bread, you get the picture…

Bev and Kim with great piles of tomatoes

Debra’s microwave lemon curd 

  • 3 large eggs plus 2 egg yolks
  • 1/2 to 3/4 cups caster sugar (adjust for your personal sweetness preference)
  • 1/2 to 3/4 cup lemon juice plus finely grated zest (can substitute some  passionfruit pulp and or lime juice within this quantity)
  • 125 g unsalted butter, melted

Whisk all ingredients together in a glass or ceramic bowl.

Microwave @  50% power for 10-12 minutes, stirring well after each minute until the mixture thickens.

Bottle in clean glass jars & store in fridge.  Use within 3 weeks.

*can be cooked on the stove using a double boiler on medium heat, stirring regularly to avoid curdling.  REMEMBER TO STORE IN FRIDGE!

Orange marmalade and tomato passata

Elizabeth’s Great-nana’s guaranteed marmalade

  • 1lb citrus fruit, sliced very finely
  • 2 pints water
  • 3lb granulated sugar

Slice citrus finely and remove pips.

Put fruit and water into your jam pot and simmer until the fruit is soft – this is important as once you put the sugar in, no further cooking occurs.  If you don’t get the fruit really soft first up, your marmalade will be impossible to chew.

Put your jars and lids into a 120deg C oven to sterilise them.  It’s important that your jam goes into hot jars – hot jam into cold jars is likely to end in an explosion.

Once the fruit is soft, add sugar and boil to setting point.  To check setting point, put a dribble of marmalade on a saucer you’ve had in the freezer for 10 minutes.  Marmalade at setting point will crinkle when you push your finger through it.

Leave the marmalade to sit for 10 minutes.  This is also important – slightly cooled marmalade will mean your fruit is evenly distributed in the jar, rather than floating on the top.

Pour into sterilised jars, seal and label.

*1 pint = 600ml, 1 lb = 455g

We are planning on having another preserving workshop in February 2013, but in the meantime – Happy preserving!

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Compost, worms and poo

Posted on October 18, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Huge thanks to Barb who lent us her backyard and shared her wisdom about all things decomposing.  It was the fifth workshop put on by the TTG Kitchen Gardeners’  Society, part of a series on producing your own food, a key aspect of building a sustainable community.

There’s a lot said about compost – but really it’s about soil health and reducing waste.  It doesn’t smell (or if it does, you’ve got it out of balance and it’s easy to fix), isn’t dirty or dangerous, doesn’t have to take up much space, and is very good horticultural practice.

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Here’s Barb with her enormous pile of poo.  That is, horse poo, nicely broken down and ready to be added to her sandy soil where her vegetables will appreciate the boost of nutrients  and water-holding qualities it will provide.  When you add manure to your garden, that is, manure that doesn’t come out of a sealed plastic bag, there are a few considerations.

1. Its freshness – newly, erm, laid poo tends to be fairly strong and can burn plants, especially seedlings.  It’s always best to let it break down for six weeks or so before you add it to your garden bed.  Chook is the harshest, while horse, cow or sheep is milder, but it’s still a good idea to let it mature a bit.

2. Seeds the animal has eaten that have passed through intact – considering poo is an ideal growing medium, viable seeds of oats and wheat will sprout as soon as they can.  You can let them sprout then dig them in as green manure, or if you compost it aerobically, it should get hot enough to kill off any viable seeds.

3. Any residual medication with which the animal may have been treated – this is a hard one.  Worming formula, for example, will likely kill lots of the good organisms in your soil.  Your best bet is to source your poo from someone you know who doesn’t use these sorts of medications.

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Making good compost is a balancing act – nitrogen and carbon, wet and dry organic material, and making sure it’s aerated.  Lots of dry garden waste, such as these palm fronds need to be balanced by a high-nitrogen, moist ingredient, such as, well, poo.

Barb also introduced us to her worm farms and her bokashi bins.  She has a system set up with friends who fill the bokashi bins, which she picks up, replacing a full bin with an empty one every few weeks.  She then buries the bin’s contents, and uses the liquid as a foliar fertiliser and to help keep her drains clear.

Her worms take care of a lot of kitchen waste, but worms don’t like meat, citrus or oniony meals.  They need to be kept cool and moist, which can be a challenge in Perth.

The Kitchen Gardeners’ Society always has afternoon tea and shares produce.

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The compost and worms workshop fitted in nicely with TTG’s recent waste and recycling survey, in which a large majority of respondents said they’d like to reduce their waste.  Composting is an excellent way of using up organic scraps, feeding your garden and reducing landfill.  If you don’t have room in your backyard, a bokashi bin under your sink will allow you to deal with food scraps in a very environmentally friendly way. The bins and the starter culture are available from hardware stores and eco outlets.

Our next workshop is on preserving the harvest on Sunday November 4.  RSVP to guilfordkitchengardeners@gmail.com if you’d like come as numbers are limited.

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