Currants

I didn't know what to do with all the grapes from my vine. They're only little ones, but very flavoursome, so I decided to try turning them into raisins.

Firstly I washed them …

… then I picked them off the bunches …

… leaving this pile of twigs:

I spread them out on  an oven rack covered in muslin …

… and put them in the oven, set at 50°C on fan, to dry. I turned them over a few times during the two days it took, and I eventually ended up with …

… currants! Now I know what sort of grapes they are. I think in America they call these things Zante currants, but we just call them currants. They are probably the most expensive currants ever made when you take into account the electricity used to dry them, so I'll have to think of something extra special to do with them.

Autumn fruits

My sister-in-law was in town the other day. Her grandfather died and she made a flying trip down for the funeral. She brought me down some fruit from her garden:

Those are, from left to right, figs, feijoas (she brought more than this but I gave some away to a friend who adores them), and passionfruit. She and my brother live in Auckland, which is sub-tropical, whereas I live in Dunedin which, although officially temperate, is more like sub-arctic a lot of the time, so it's quite a treat to get fresh fruit like this that I can't grow.

Of course I couldn't eat it all at once, some preserving needed to be done.

I halved all of the passionfruit, …

… scooped out the pulp into ice cube (except they're not cubes) trays …

… and froze it. When it was all frozen solid I popped it out of the trays …

… and put the lumps into a freezer box for easy access:

Now when I want a passionfruit I can just defrost a lump or two of pulp.

The figs were next. I decided on fig jam.

I had 750 g of figs and my jam book told me to cover them with boiling water for 3 minutes, …

… then drain them and squeeze out the excess water. There wasn't any excess water to I went on to the next step …

Which was cut them up or crush them, and cook in a tablespoon of lemon juice, adding a little water if necessary to stop them sticking:

Once they were tender (not sure about this, they seemed pretty tender to me from the beginning, I waited until they were cooked to mush) I was to add a cup of sugar and boil quickly until the setting point was reached. Setting point was pretty much immediately - I think these figs might have been a bit juice deficient.

Anyway, I poured the jam into hot sterilised (sort of, straight out of the hot dishwasher) jars and screwed on the lids:

Now I need to get my act together and make some labels.

And look what was in my very own garden:

There are heaps more on the vine too. They are very small grapes, but very tasty. I only get grapes every three years or so; grapes are not supposed to be able to grow outside here really at all. Most people have their grapevines in a glasshouse.

Ginger again

I made another batch of crystallised ginger last week, and saved all the boiling water changes to make syrup.

I ended up with more then two litres of ginger-lemon syrup, of which I use about 20 ml for a cup of hot lemon-ginger drink.
Hopefully this batch of ginger will last longer too. I took the last lot to work and it disappeared in a couple of days.

Ginger

And by-products.

I made crystallised ginger, ginger in syrup, ginger syrup, and ginger and lemon syrup.


Firstly I peeled and cut up the ginger into bite-sized pieces. Then I boiled it in water and discarded the water several times. This reduces the heat of the finished product, and I'd discarded several pots of water before I thought of keeping it and adding sugar to make a syrup for adding to drinks. I did eventually think of it though. I reduced it quite considerably, which resulted in a good strong thick syrup which requires only a teaspoonful or so added to hot water and lemon (and whisky?) to make a cure for anything that might ail you.

Then I added sugar to the last boiling water and left the ginger to soak overnight. My recipe wanted me to boil the syrup for 10 minutes the next day to reduce it, but I added more sugar instead. The next day I boiled the ginger in the syrup for 5 minutes, then I left it for 3 days, by which time it was sort of transparent looking. I brought it to the boil yet once more …

… put half of it in a jar …

and covered it in syrup …

… then dried the other half briefly in the oven at 50°C …

… before tossing it in caster sugar.

I added some grated lemon zest, the juice of a lemon, and a teaspoon of citric acid to the left over syrup, making something that's nice on ice cream, or can be diluted in water to make a delicious drink without needing any additions.

Left to right: crystallised ginger, ginger syrup, ginger and lemon syrup, ginger in syrup.

Chocolate cherries

The other week I made some glacé cherries, using the same recipe that I used for the kiwifruit, and Stella cherries I pitted and froze back in January. They were gorgeous …

… but I improved them by dipping them in bittersweet chocolate (Whittakers 72%) …

… and leaving them to set:

Then I took them to pub quiz for Sophie's last night before she moves to Australia. We didn't do very well in the quiz, only fourth, but the cherries went down a treat.

I saved the syrup that was left after making the cherries to use as an ice cream topping. It's super thick and very scrummy.

Marrons glacé

Chestnuts are not a traditional food in New Zealand, in fact I'd never seen anything other than a horse chestnut until I saw these in the supermarket the other week:


I must say, people who rely on these things as a staple starch certainly have to put a lot of work into getting their food. There's probably some trick to peeling the things that I don't know.

However, what I did was to slit the shells, par-boil them, then peel off the outer shells. I tried to peel the inner membrane too, but the chestnuts started to disintegrate.


Once they'd cooled I reheated them quickly in hot water so just the outsides were warm, and they were a lot easier to deal with.


The procedure for making marrons glacé is very similar to that I used for glacé kiwifruit, but on day five you boil the chestnuts for a few minutes in the syrup and added sugar, then leave them for two days, then repeat and leave them for four days.


After that you drain them …


… and dry them:


I've never eaten marrons glacé before either, so I'm not sure if they've turned out the way they should. They're nice though.

Glacé kiwifruit

Wil and Nic brought a bunch of fruit when they came to stay, including three kiwifruit I didn't know what to do with. I didn't feel like just eating them, yummy though they are, so I had a go at making glacé kiwifruit, and I'll be doing it again in much larger quantities.

It's a reasonably long process, but doesn't require much actual work. First you peel and slice the fruit, then you parboil it and soak it in increasingly sugary syrup over several days, then you dry it.

This is my little batch in the oven at 50°C:


And here it is all finished:


It didn't last long, I couldn't stop nibbling until it was all gone. So much nicer than the crystallised stuff you get in the supermarket.

Recipe

Crystallised fruit

Ingredients
fruit
sugar (make sure you have plenty)

Method
Prepare fruit by peeling things like kiwifruit and stoning things like plums and cherries. Basically get it ready for eating.
Cut into bite-sized pieces, if slicing don't slice too thinly. About 1 cm is right. Leave small things like cherries whole.
Put in a pot and just cover with water. Bring to boiling point and simmer until the fruit is about half cooked. With kiwifruit this is about a minute!
Remove the fruit from the pot and put it in a non-reactive bowl. I used a small pyrex dish with a lid.
Return the cooking water to the pot and add 200g of sugar to each cup and a quarter of cooking water (henceforth all amounts are relative to this). Dissolve, bring to the boil, and pour over the fruit. Cover it.
* Next day drain the juice back into a pot and add 50 g sugar, dissolve, bring to the boil, pour back over fruit.
Repeat from * daily for five days.
Drain fruit, reserving thick syrup to use as an ice-cream topping or suchlike.
Place fruit on a wire rack and leave to dry in either a sunny spot or a very low (50°C) oven.

Candied peel

In the interests of thriftiness and deliciousness, whenever you are using just the juice or flesh of any citrus, try candying the peel. Excellent for using in cakes and buns, or as a decoration.

Peel the fruit thickly, and try to remember next time to do it before you juice them …


… because it's not so easy afterwards.

Put the peel in a pot with some water and a little baking soda, leave to soak for 20 minutes.

Drain the peel and add fresh water. Bring to the boil and cook until tender.


Drain it again, and add a syrup made from equal volumes of sugar and water. I used a cup of each. Bring to the boil, then let it cool and leave it to soak for a couple of days.

Add half as much sugar again (half a cup for me), bring it back to the boil and simmer until the peel is transparent.


My lime peel refused to go transparent no matter how long I cooked it, but the lemon peel did as expected.

Dry the peel on a rack, either in the sun or in a cool oven.


If you want you can dip the peel in the reserved syrup again and dry it a second time, but I cooked mine so long trying to get the lime peel to go transparent that my syrup was damned near solid when it cooled.


But my peel is delicious. I need to put it away so I stop picking at it. I can't make up my mind whether to chop it up small now, or to do it as I need it.

Plums

The Omega plums arrived last week:


They're mostly in the freezer by now. The ones I haven't eaten, that is. They are delicious.