Squirreling

Squirrel in Jessica's garden.

Not wanting anything go to waste, and remembering the little grey squirrel we saw in Jessica's garden last year,  saw me spending a morning processing some of our harvests.

Firstly the threat of frost made me want to save the healthy looking basil plants. Annabel Langbein makes a basil oil and it looked both easy and useful.

Boiling water is poured over the leaves and then they are  drained and plunged into cold water. The water is removed as much as possible and then blitzed with good quality olive oil. The oil can be separated from the pulped basil leaves but I chose to leave it in. It can be kept in the fridge for several days or frozen in ice cube moulds for use later in the winter.

Grapes were in abundance on our vines in Clyde when we were down there just after Easter. The large black ones were certainly the sweeter of the three varieties and we came away with several large supermarket bag fulls. There are only so many that you can eat or give away, so the “Get Growing NZ’ digital newsletter I get every week from the NZ Gardener came in handy. Several readers had sent in recipes and ideas for using those extra grapes and making grape juice as opposed to wine was just one idea. I used a mixture of the sweet and not so sweet red grapes for my juice by placing them in a large pan and mashing them with a potato masher. I then covered them with water and brought it to the boil until they were soft and had released all their juice. This mixture was then strained through muslin, reboiled and then bottled into sterilised bottles and capped.  

Foraged apples are abundant along the sides of many of our roads at this time of the year. Following old railway lines is the perfect place to start looking. Apple cores must have discarded from the passengers in years gone by.  We have used these apples to eat, and cook into pies and desserts but we do have such a lot so I decided we should juice some of them. Past experience has taught us that unripe apples produce sour juice so the riper and sweeter they are the nicer the juice.  We have a cold press juicer so all that is required is to have the generator running and it is all go. This juice can be drunk as it is, or boiled and reduced to make apple syrup. This makes an excellent alternative to maple syrup for the pancakes. I suspect the grape juice could get the same treatment which I may well try. I can see though why these fruit syrups are so expensive to buy. The yield per litre of juice is very small.