Autumn Days

                                               Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
                                               Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
                                               Conspiring with him how to load and bless
                                               With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
                                               To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
                                               And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
                                               To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
                                               With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
                                               And still more, later flowers for the bees,
                                               Until they think warm days will never cease,
                                               For Summer has o'er brimmed their clammy cell.
                                                                                  From Ode to Autumn by John Keats


The days are definitely feeling Autumnal now- mists in the morning and a couple of times the grass has been white with frost. The leaves on the squash/triffid that's taken over the quail run have definitely been caught.

The girls and I picked all the tomatoes that were left and have set some green ones out to ripen, others are destined for green tomato chutney.

Lots of tomatoes

...yet more tomatoes...

My granny had the Farmer's Weekly cookbook from 1947, full of recipes from Mrs Smith from Godalming or Miss Christina McKay from Aberdeenshire. As well as just being fascinating to read, it has the 'family' chutney recipe in it. My mum didn't do much in the way of jam making when I was a child but she did make this chutney and an autumn without this smell in the house just isn't right. I make other chutneys too- runner bean relish with sesame seeds is a big favourite- but there has to be green tomato chutney on the shelves. I started to make it but realised I'd run out of onions so here's a picture of damson cheese instead...

Sieving damsons for cheese

I am running out of space on the shelves now. As part of my larder building and generally wanting to sort the house out as we prepare to spend more time in it over the winter I've tidied up my robber's cave of a pantry.
I say pantry... it's actually a passage way down the side of the house that connects the front porch to a door in the kitchen with the garage door off of it. We put shelves along one side and hooks for brooms etc on the other and it's referred to as Malthouse Passage after a scene in The Plank,  an 1967 (mostly) silent film by Eric Sykes with Tommy Cooper that was a favourite of my dad's. 'Malthouse Passage' is about the only thing that's said in the whole film. It was remade in 1979 with Arthur Lowe (Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army) in it if you'd like to see what London looked like 12 years later.


                                           

Anyway, I've tidied it up but the shelves are still groaning. Some will be given as gifts at Christmas (there's also an indecent amount of sloe gin, elderflower and rose vodka, rhubarb and ginger gin and blackberry whisky in there too but they will go in hampers. Mostly.)

Liqueur  from one of last year's hampers being enjoyed

Another essential pre-winter ritual is making elderberry cordial. I use this recipe from Eat Weeds which has cloves in it too, adding to the anti-viral action and also helping to preserve it too. I store it in sterilised brown beer bottles with swing top lids that we saved from a holiday to Alsace and the Black Forest years ago. With the cloves in it tastes really good diluted with hot water- almost a non-alcoholic mulled wine. I have been known to add a cinnamon stick too...

Straining cooked elderberries

We're planning apple pressing next weekend- some for cider and some for apple juice. Freshly pressed apple juice tastes incredible but it starts to ferment very quickly. We freeze some as the next best option but we'll pasteurise some too. We share a pasteuriser with two other families which works out well. The juice from that isn't quite as good as frozen- it's like really posh shop bought juice- but it's nice to have some shelf stable and keep some space in the freezer for other things.
Husband went through the various barrels and demijohns of last years cider and has bottled some with sugar to secondary ferment- it turns from a flat, slightly cloudy scrumpy into a clear sparkling fizzy cider which is much more potent than it tastes!

Bottled cider

Before that I need to do more tidying in the garden, picking the green beans and squash, harvesting the now dry-looking gigantes and mulching the beds with mushroom compost before planting the garlic I'm dithering over. I will be more organised with where I plant it this year as trying to plant round a hotch potch of garlic sprouts in the spring was a pain.

In the house, we have plenty of wood for winter fires (we have a wood stove and a wood fired Rayburn downstairs and radiators upstairs which we use minimally, mostly because it gets damp if there's no heat at all- the windows are at least 30 years old and desperately need replacing. Our boiler is oil-fired and there's nothing like watching the level of the oil in the tank drop to make you think about what you're using!) A neighbour has access to untreated pine offcuts which make excellent kindling so between that, the prunings from the overgrown garden hedge and some ordered in hardwood logs we should be ok. I also preform my civic duty by clearing the churchyard of beech twigs and I compulsively collect fir cones to keep the kindling buckets stocked.

I'm busily sorting through cupboards and drawers and have accumulated a huge pile of stuff for ebay and charity shops and maybe even a carboot sale before the end of the season to help with Christmas. We don't go mad on present buying but you can't make everything for 3 teenaged children.