Spicy plum chutney recipe: plum & chilli jam

Posted by louisa on Friday 24 September 2010 in preserving, recipes, wild food | 6 comments

With the last of the plums from the wild tree next to our house, I made a delicious spicy plum and chilli chutney.

The plums are slightly smaller than cultivated ones but highly flavoured – both sweet & tart at the same time. Yum!

My Spicy Marrow Chutney recipe uses flavours inspired by the Indian sub-continent but this spicy plum chutney uses flavours from further east than that.

It’s not a thick jelly-ish jam but is delicious spread thinly on a cracker and topped with a piece of tasty cheese. Mmm, cheese.

Adding a second level to the chicken run?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 September 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

In advance of possibly expanding the tribe, I’ve been thinking of installing a mezzanine level in part of the chicken run. A metre-square or so, depending on the dimensions of the building materials.

I’ve had two ideas for it:

1) A table-like design – but with a rim around the outside so that it could hold wood chippings like on the floor of their run, and essentially be just a raised extension of the ground, or

2) Something slatted/including perches, since they do rather like perching.

The first option (which I’d likely make with a solid-topped pallet I was given recently, or with old formica desks that John’s dad salvaged from the skip at the school near him) would provide extra shelter in the run but might have drainage problems. The latter (made with other wooden pallets) wouldn’t provide any shelter but wouldn’t clog up with mud either, and as I said, they do rather like perching.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

Regifting – do you do it? how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 September 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal | 3 comments

The other day, a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that may become more apparent later, told me he had spent part of his weekend wrapping Christmas presents. I pulled a WTF face – wrapping Christmas presents? in September?!

He explained that whenever they have to go to the faff of getting the paper, tags, tape etc out to wrap one present, like a birthday present, they wrap a whole bunch of them at the same time to be more efficient. He added that they also have a cunning present recycling strategy.

Whenever the friend and his lady are given birthday/Christmas/random presents they don’t want, they stick a post-it note on it and add it to their to-give present box so it can be regifted in the future without any chance of it ending up back with the original giver.

As I’ve explained before on Recycle This, I’d much rather not get the gifts in the first place and unlike my super nice friend, I’d rather make things a bit awkward than accept the items because I’m uppity and mardy like that – but I think the post-its are a great, simple idea to avoid re-gifting embarrassment.

Do you regift? Or otherwise give gifts of things you already have around your home? Do you have any strategies to avoid giving them back to the giver?

If you’d never regift, why not? How would you feel if you were given something you suspected had been re-gifted? Would you say anything?

Super easy blackberry jam recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 September 2010 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 11 comments

I love cooking but I have a surprisingly low tolerance for faff – particularly faff involving large quantities of sticky substances that need to sit for a long amount of time. I’m also very clumsy, live with an equally clumsy boy, and have less than graceful pets. In other words, preserves that involve the use of jelly bags are not for me.

Most blackberry jam recipes are more like blackberry jelly recipes – they involve straining out the juice and using that to make to the finished pulp-free seedless product. However, if you don’t mind partial berries and seeds, this blackberry jam is super easy and tastes really, really good!

Realising why we have so many books – and what we can do about it

Posted by louisa on Monday 20 September 2010 in decluttering | 2 comments

(Apologies if this is stating the bleedin’ obvious but it was a revelation to us! ;) )

Our rather nomadic friend Dan popped by our house on Saturday to meet the dog and the chickens and say a passing hello to us before he moves on again. Between various post-grad studies, jobs and that crazy little thing called love, Dan’s moved around a lot over the last few years and he revealed that ahead of/during his moves, he’s pared down his book collection considerably, from about 500 tomes to just 100. Since we’re book-y people (we met on an English Literature course) to get rid of that many is quite an achievement.

Even with my new anti-hoarding policy (of giving away a book for every two new-to-me books I buy), I still find it difficult to give books away – but it was only while talking to Dan that I realised why. Most of the time, I don’t have any particular attachment to the physical books but I have great affection for the stories contained within. And a considerable amount of the time, I have no desire to read the story again any time soon, I just don’t want to forget it exists — seeing the spine on my shelves reminds me of the story and often reminds me of the time of my life when I read it etc. The example we both used were Ben Elton’s early novels – the environmental ones, Gridlock, Stark and This Other Eden. Not exactly literary masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, not books I’ve read in the last decade and not books I see myself reading in the next five years or more – but I remember finding them interesting as a teenager and still think about some of the ideas regularly to this day. It was the first time I’d really consciously realised the current purpose of a considerable part of my book collection (and to a lesser extent, our media collection too).