Biscuit topped apple crumble

We got a bag of apples off an uncle last week so I decided to make a crumble. I had a packet of hazelnuts in the fridge, with some rough instructions on how to make a rhubarb crumble, so I adapted them.

150g of oat biscuits (I used a mix of hobnobs and digestives)
50g of whole hazel nuts
700g of cooking apples
2 tbsp of sugar
A couple of tbsp of water

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees c.

First toast the hazel nuts under a hot grill. This only takes a few minutes. Keep an eye on them as they burn easily. When they are done, allow them to cool and chop them roughly.
Next chop up the biscuits and give them a good bashing. No point in getting too fussy about this, nice and rough is just fine.
Peel and slice the apples and put them in a pan with the water and sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 5 minutes. Pour the lot into a casserole or deep pie dish. Mix the biscuits and nuts together and spread them over the apple mixture. Put it in the oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with some vanilla ice cream.

Beetroot harvest and saving tomato seed

These are a couple of beetroot that I pulled up yesterday. We had them with mackerel and the horseradish and natural yogurt sauce. Along with some new potatoes from Wexford they made a delicious dinner.

A courgette and tomato soup for lunch

The garden is bursting with vegetables at the moment so it seemed like a good idea to make a light soup for lunch. There are about 5 courgettes in the fridge and a small bunch of tomatoes in the fruit bowl which need to be eaten so that more can be taken in off the plants. The first of the leeks are also ready to eat. I didn't get many leeks to germinate this year (new seed next year I reckon), but those I did plant out came up well.

I decided to make a light soup using as much of this stuff as I could.

First sweat these vegetables (finely chopped) in a good glug of olive oil.

1 onion
3 carrots
3 celery sticks
1 leek

This takes about 15 minutes. Then add a litre of light vegetable stock - I used marigold powder, but anything else including chicken stock would work fine.
Then skin 4 or 5 tomatoes and chop them into quarters and cut 2 small courgettes into thick matchsticks.

Throw these into the pot and season with pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 10 minutes.
Serve with plenty of chopped fresh parsley and some bread and cheese. It makes a lovely lunch. We used the currant bread that I made a couple of days ago, toasted and spread with real butter and topped with slices of cheddar. 

Start of the tomato harvest and autumn weeding

Tomatoes ready to pick
I picked a couple of orange tomatoes last week as we were going away for a few days and I didn't want them to fall on the ground while we were gone. They were a bit bland when we ate them, too excited to wait until they had ripened fully on the window. The sun has been good to us over the last week despite the huge downpours of rain that we have had. The tomatoes are all starting to ripen. It will be a good harvest this year I reckon. I picked the three ripest ones today, but will wait until the others ripen and will pick them as needed. I think I will try to make a tomato ketchup this year. It's something I have always wanted to have a go at and it looks like we will have enough ripe tomatoes this year. A big batch of chutney is on the cards too along with a batch or two of tomato soup.

Parsnips
The parsnips are still growing strong. Waiting for the foliage to die off until we start eating these. They are mainly a winter veg though, so probably better to wait until they get a couple of frosts before we make something nice and cozy with them. There is a great temptation to take a peek to see how they are doing. All I know at the moment is that the foliage is big and healthy. That's gotta be a good thing I suppose.

Weeding
I weeded the whole patch today. There wasn't a huge amount of stuff. When the vegetables are big they tend to crowd out the nasties. But better to keep the weeds in control anyway to stop them getting a chance to go to seed.

Slugs
I did not see many slugs on my travels today. My collection effort a couple of days ago must have gotten the bulk of them. About a week ago I threw a batch of spent hops from my recent brew onto some cleared ground in the vegetable patch. It is effectively cooked (boiled for about an hour) so I did not want to put it into the compost heap. It attracted a load of slugs. I picked all these up and killed them, but I don't think this is a great idea as unlike the beer traps that I normally put down the spent hops don't kill them. They get to breed with a nice supply of food. Not good. My wormery arrives on Monday, so from now on cooked stuff including spent hops can go in there. 

Currant bread

Made some currant bread today. Only took a few minutes to put together. I used the electric mixer to make it a bit easier.

Preheat your oven to 200 C.

Throw the following in a bowl:

500g plain white flour
good pinch of salt
120g of sultanas or currants
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking soda
300 ml of buttermilk
1 egg


Give the whole lot a good mix. Dust your hands with some flour and shape the dough into a ball in the bowl. Put a layer of non stick cooking paper on a baking sheet. Grease this with some butter or margarine. Turn the dough out on to this and shape it into a rough round. Cut a deep cross into the top of the loaf. Bake for 45 minutes. Tap it on the base to make sure its done.

Brewing update and a plan to grow hops

Brewing update
The beer that I am brewing is progressing nicely. It is sitting in a 25 litre plastic fermentation vessel (bucket) in the corner of the kitchen at the moment. The vessel has a snap tight lid which lets gas out when the pressure gets high enough. I tend to release the lip of the lid for the first few days of fermentation to prevent the lid buckling under pressure. This is also a good way to check the progress of your beer as the vigor of the fermentation is related to how long it takes the lid to bulge upwards.
Based on this the fermentation is slowing down after one week exactly. This is what I would expect. Will leave it where it is for another week or two before bottling it and hopefully having the self control to let it condition a bit.

Growing hops in Ireland
I saw pictures of another home brewers garden a few years ago and he was growing hops for his own use. They seemed to be very vigorous and he said they were easy to grow. I think hops used to be a big crop in Ireland, but as far as I know nobody except Rupert in Cork are growing them commercially any more.
A while searching on the web revealed that a lot of people are interested in this, but few are doing it. To grow hops you need a rhizome (chunk of underground plant stem) or a young plant. There is a supplier in Germany called Eickelmann which seems to get good reviews. The stems are not expensive, so I reckon this is worth trying out in the spring.
I reckon I will need a much bigger garden if I am every to try growing barley for my beer, but I would really love to give malting and all grain brewing a go. Growing hops will hopefully be an easier introduction to growing for brewing.

Food safety scares in the US

There has been a spate of food safety scares in the US recently. The latest concerns an elevated level of salmonella infections in eggs. Several different products have been affected in previous scares, including spinach. What do you have to do to spinach to make it dangerous enough to spark a governmental response?

Increasing amounts of the food that Americans consume is produced in huge factories by a shrinking number of large companies. As the number of companies producing food drops the impact of a problem with a producer gets bigger. The food security of large sections of the developed world is left at the mercy of the directors of a small number of companies. The recent financial crisis has shown that leaders of corporations are not to be trusted with the greater good. Food giants will be no different, and the impact on society could be just as devastating.

At a recent inspection of an egg producer (they are not farmers any more) piles of dead rats, manure and maggots were found a short distance from the egg production area.

In a world where so few people know how to produce any of their own food, what would be the impact of the shutdown of a significant portion of the current manufacturing machinery?

How do ordinary people protect themselves against this threat?

It is difficult to see how a person can protect themselves fully against this without being self sufficient and I am not advocating that for most people. However growing some of your own food. Cooking as much of your food as you can and finding out where it all comes from are three steps that can make a big difference to your well being, both now and in the case of a bigger scale problem in the future.