Lovely Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 26 January 2011 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 6 comments

I mentioned on Monday that I made a batch of lemon curd while my frustrating, sticky marmalade was boiling away.

Lemon curd is far easier and more fun to make than marmalade, and oh my wow, it’s delicious.

It doesn’t have a long shelf life though – what with the butter and the eggs – but I don’t mind having to make it regularly because it’s so quick and easy that it’s not a problem.

Compared to jams from foraged or grown fruit (where the only expenses are sugar, a tiny bit of spice & energy), this is expensive – lots of bought-in items. Using eggs from our own chickens, it worked out at about 70p a jar; if we’d had to buy in good eggs, it would have been about £1 a jar – not break-the-bank expensive and it is very very nice, but not the cheapest either (the blackberry jam I made last autumn worked out at about 25p a jar since the only thing I had to buy was sugar). It’s a good way to use up egg gluts – something we’ll have to get more proactive with now the girls are laying more.

Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Ingredients
5 large lemons
5 medium-to-large eggs
250g of butter (!), room temperature
400g of golden caster sugar
2tsp of cornflour

Makes just under 3lbs of lovely lemon curd

The rubbish people give us

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 25 January 2011 in green | 12 comments

Colette from the Permaculture Cottage blog mentioned yesterday that she returned from a visit to see her mum with jam jars, newspaper and “other bits and bobs for recycling”.

We collect “rubbish” from friends and family too – we brought back a box full of trash from visiting my mum & dad in Southport in November, and over the last month or so, we’ve been given all sorts of things to reuse, such as:

• Screw top bottles from our party-hearty neighbour (he uses our glass recycling bin as overflow for his own smaller bin so he’s bringing them around one way or another) – John will use these for his homebrew wine when he finally bottles it up
• Some old (chip board) shelving units from the same neighbour – will become shelving in our garage-ette
• Glass jars from Strowger – he brings some nearly every week, the star – used for my marmalade and lemon curding antics over the weekend
• Egg boxes from John’s mum and John’s brother & sister-in-law
• Plastic food tubs from John’s mum
• Newspapers from John’s dad – old newspapers for starting our woodburner or lining the chicken coop to make it easier to clean
• Wood from John’s dad for burning (although I do save the best bits for making stuff with)
• An old wine rack from John’s dad – which will also be used when John bottles up his wine

I was also going to get a going-to-the-tip kitchen cabinet from our next-door-but-one neighbours (to turn into a cold smoking cabinet) but John’s dad got their first — you win some, you lose some ;)

Six things I learnt while making marmalade yesterday

Posted by louisa on Monday 24 January 2011 in cooking, preserving | 16 comments

1. Squeezing multiple oranges and lemons after a couple of days of sewing & gardening is a mistake

I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning cutting back scratchy shrubs (including working underneath a holly bush) and I spent Thursday & Friday evening sewing (aka stabbing myself in the fingers with needles). I also have a tendency to bite the skin around my nails.

OH MY OW.

(Although admittedly after searing pain for a few minutes, it stopped hurting quite so much. They did keep tingling overnight though and even now are more painfully than little cuts or scratches should be.)

2. It’s easier to finely slice rind if it’s rind up, pith down than vice versa

I started with the rind to the chopping board but made much better progress when it was the other way around.

Lettuce begin – the 2011 growing season is underway!

Posted by louisa on Friday 21 January 2011 in growing | 10 comments

Check these out:

My first baby seedling shoots of 2011!

They’re Winter Gem lettuces – planted a little late in their growing window but they wouldn’t have germinated in the super cold of December.

We grew them last year too – planted about now – and they formed tasty greener-than-the-picture heads by early April – just when we wanted to start eating lots of salad but before our spring salad leaves were ready.

(I’d intended to start a batch on 1st Oct, 1st Nov, 1st Dec & 1st Jan to see where the sweet spot was for planting them and how early we could enjoy the heads – but didn’t get around to it. Maybe next year.)

I think these little tiny shoots delight me because they represent the start of the 2011 growing season – before we know it, we’ll be up to our ears in courgettes, tomatoes and all sorts of salad & greens.

After a chilly few days this week (the ground’s been frozen since about Tuesday), it’s supposed to be warming up a little over the weekend – which means, hopefully, I’ll be able to get into the garden. I’ve got a few baby fruit bushes to plant on and a couple of inherited, overgrown shrubs to pull up to replace with fruit trees/bushes.

I’m also going to try to get ahead of myself and fill lots of pots with my starting soil mix so they’re ready for seeds when the time comes. My “to plant in Feb” and “to plant in March” seed packet piles are rather extensive so any help I can give my future self will be gratefully received!

Have you started growing anything in 2011 yet? When does your growing season start?

And since at least a few of you are on t’other side of the globe so are in the opposite situation, have you been planting anything for overwintering?

How I line dry clothes in winter: my top five tips

Posted by louisa on Thursday 20 January 2011 in frugal, meta | 24 comments

Line drying clothes outside has been a near impossibility this winter – but aside from a load of bedding (including a duvet) that got vomited on (thanks Lily-dog), I’ve line dried everything else inside.

Here’s some of the tricks I’ve used:

1) Get lazier – leave stuff to wash later when the weather is better

Aside from when there have been sick dog incidents, I leave stuff like towels & bedding in the washing basket until they really need doing because our stash of spare clean ones are running low – or until it looks like it’ll be a nice enough day to dry a load outside. Our bedding really needs to line dry outside to blow out the animal fluff.

If heavy things like throws and cushions/pillows get dirty, they just get taken out of use until it looks like there will be a run of decent drying days (even if that means waiting until spring).

If I can’t see myself wearing an item of clothing until much later in the year – some piece of occasional wear like a nice dress or skirt – then they won’t get washed until later in the year either.

I’ll catch up washing everything eventually but in the meantime, it means there isn’t as much congestion for my limited airer space.

2) Get more organised

That congestion on the airer is my main problem so I make sure I wash loads regularly, without too much needing doing at once.

If I do get a backlog – for example when I was ill at the start of the year or when our washing machines pipes froze (then unfroze all over the kitchen), I separate by both colour (light/dark) and by weight of fabric – all coloured t-shirts etc in the first load, then heavier stuff such as jeans & hoodies in the next. The t-shirts will be dry in a day or so, emptying the whole airer for the heavier stuff, which takes three days or so to dry – rather than two mixed loads which would both take a 3+ days to dry. (Another reason to batch wash’n’dry towels rather than doing some in each load.)

Socks & underwear etc are used to fill up space whenever there is a bit of empty space. They get dried on the peg airer thing (see below).