La Recette du Jour

You can use green or red tomatoes -- red tomatoes result in a lovely colour, but the jam is very sweet. All the usual rules for jam-making apply.

For when you have so many tomatoes you don't know what do do with them, the freezer is full, you are eating tomatoes at every meal, and still they come!

Home-made lemon curd is so quick and easy to do, and so delicious, that there's no excuse for not making it when lemons are cheap and plentiful. Keep in the fridge and consume within a few weeks. This quantity makes about 2 jars.

It can be done in the microwave, but I make it in a double boiler; it's just as quick and you can see exactly when it's ready.

We are fortunate enough to know someone with an organically cultivated apricot orchard, and at this time of year we take delivery of a 10kg crate of golden, red-tinged apricots. Unlike the under-ripe, tasteless apricots you get in shops, these are actually a pleasure to eat raw. Still, we can't eat 10kg of apricots in a weekend, so time to get the preserving pan out.

Last year I made the best apricot jam I've ever made with these apricots, but I made so much we still have some jars left, so this time I "only" used 2kg of apricots for that. Another excellent and very easy way of keeping apricots is to preserve them raw in a mixture of syrup and alcohol. The resulting apricots are delicious in any cooked apricot dessert, or just as they are with cream or ice cream. And of course the preserving liquid makes a very nice digestif.

As usual at this time of year, we have a glut of grapes; our plot of vines is for making wine, but in the old days people often planted a few table grapes amidst the others. So every now and then when harvesting you come across heavy bunches of sweet, greenish-gold grapes instead of the deep red Carignan.

The trouble with grapes is they don't keep long, and you'd better believe you can't give them away around here at harvest time. So we often end up throwing many of them away. This year I was determined not to, and grape jelly was about the only way I could think of for preserving them. A bit of googling turned up a site which looked interesting and had not one but two recipes for preserving grapes. And unlike many sites it was clear that they really had tried the recipes, repeatedly.

So these two recipes come from The Cottage Smallholder; I'm only copying them here because it would be unfortunate if next time around their site had disappeared! It looks well worth bookmarking if you are interested in home-grown food.