Lift Mikhallil - Pickled turnips

My little helper just likes to watch, doesn't eat turnips!

I wasn't able to get to the allotment for a few months (fractured, chipped & dislocated shoulder), and I had told a friend they could help themselves to anything that was ready to harvest. 

I got down there for the first time this week and had quite a few turnips/swedes to harvest.  I wasn't sure how much of them were saveable - you can never tell till you cut them open, because they'd been in so long.

I decided to pickle them, using an Egyptian recipe, so I hope they turn out as nice as I remember when I was there!

The usual disclaimer applies - I fudge recipes, so what actually happened is in itallics.

2kg turnips (2.3kg turnip/swede mix - before top'n'tail)
1 beetroot (didn't have any, sent b/f to the shop for one)
6-8 cups of water (forgot to measure)
3-4 tablespoons salt (used more, because I didn't read the recipe properly!)


Wash turnips & beetroot, scrub well. (turnips needed peeling, b/f came back with 5 precooked beets)  Cut into pieces. 

Sprinkle with salt & leave to sweat for 24 hours (used all salt).







Boil water with salt and put into pickling jar to cool (this is how I ended up using more salt). 







Drain turnips, squeeze gently and put in jars with the beetroot.





Should be ready after 24 hours.

Egg & Veg Muffins

Apart from working shifts and not getting breakfast until after 12 some days, I'm also doing a Boot Camp exercise plan at the moment and there are lots of restrictions on food.  Well, not lots, but it makes it hard to grab'n'run.

I've adapted an Egg Muffin recipe I found, and this is what I've come up with.  There are very few measurements because it's based on how much and what veg I've got in!  There was supposed to be some meat of some sort in as well, but I forgot it!

The original recipe was 12 muffins, using 12 eggs, so my logic was 6 eggs = 6 muffins.

Today's recipe was:
6 eggs
1 courgette
1 onion
2 mushrooms
some salt

Mix the eggs up in a bowl with the salt.
Fry up the veges.

Combine the eggs and veg in the bowl and mix again.

Pour into muffin cases and cook for about 30 mins.

I'm going to try them out with a mixture of other veg another day, maybe remember some meat (perhaps a bacon & egg muffin, but gotta be healthier than the mc-version?)

6 eggs = 7 muffins today!

Rhubarb Custard Pie

This is a friend's family recipe, so big thanks to her for sharing!

Short sweet pastry
2 cups of rhubarb (I used a bit more than 2 cups because of my dish)
2 eggs
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup of sugar
2 tablespoons flour

Line a backing dish with 2/3 of pastry.

Chop the rhubarb into 1-2cm pieces and put into pastry lined dish. 

Mix the eggs, melted butter, sugar and flour together and pour over rhubarb. 

Using last 1/3 roll out and lattice cut, put on top. 


(forgot to put the rhubarb in the pic, but I'm sure you know what chopped rhubarb looks like!)

Bake at 400*f (200*C) for 10min then reduce to 350*f (180*C) for 30min or until custard is set (after following the instructions and adding an extra 10 mins cooking, the custard hadn't set, so I put it back up to 200*C for another 15 mins).

ENJOY (definitely the easiest part!)

Rhubarb & Lemon Jam

Using the leftover pulp from the Rhubarb Lemonade, I made a couple of jars of jam.  I've got my trusty Edmonds Cookbook which doesn't just give recipes, but tips as well, so I just got a rough idea of what I was supposed to do, and we'll just see how it turns out!


There was roughly 2 cups of pulp, which had already had sugar added, so I flattened out the pulp in the bottom of the pan, just covered it with water and brought it to the boil.

Then I added about 1.5 cups of sugar (technically, the recipes all showed 1:1, but I ran out of sugar and figured there was still some in the pulp).

Boiled until it looked right and put in jars.

Rhubarb Lemonade

Halved the recipe because of the size of my pan!  The full recipe is below, what I did is in itallics as usual!  I got this recipe from Allrecipes.com.

8 cups chopped rhubarb (4 cups)
3 cups sugar (1.5 cups)
3 tablespoons grated lemon peel
1.5 cups lemon juice (3/4 cup)
18 cups water (9 cups)



 
Combine the rhubarb, sugar, and grated lemon peel into a large saucepan and bring to a boil. 

Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the sugar has dissolved and the rhubarb releases its juice and starts to break up, about 10 minutes. 

Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice. 

Pour the rhubarb mixture through a fine sieve, pressing out as much liquid as possible. 

To serve, mix the rhubarb syrup with 18 cups of water (1 cup of syrup per 3 cups of water) and pour over ice.

I'm pretty sure I'll be using the pulp to make jam afterwards....waste not, want not! 

 

Rhubarb & Pineapple Jelly

What to do with the possibly-last crop of rhubarb?  Preferably something I haven't done before..... internet searches, here we come!

As per usual..... the recipe is below, and what I actually did is in itallics!
I have a very good reason (this time) for halving the recipe - I did have enough rhubarb for the full recipe, but remembered in time that my pot doesn't always hold the full amount, so while I was cutting the rhubarb it became clear that 10 cups didn't have a hope in hell of fitting in!

10 cups of chopped rhubarb (5 cups)
1 can (20 oz) of crushed pineapple (undrained) (my can was 227g)
2 cups of sugar (1 cup)
1 packet (6oz) of strawberry flavoured jell-o (1 packet was 135g jelly)




Place the rhubarb, pineapple, and sugar into a large saucepan. 

Bring to a boil over medium heat; cook and stir until rhubarb is tender, about 20 minutes. 





Remove from heat, and stir in gelatin until completely blended. 







Ladle into glass jars or plastic containers to refrigerate or freeze.

I licked the spoon....I've died and gone to heaven!  These may not have time to set!!!  Self-control is necessary!

Rosehip Syrup

I popped round to a friend's house today because she has Rosehips growing and I'd never seen them before.  There, I admit it, purely nosey!

rosehip berries and flower

We did a swap, rhubarb for rosehip, both very happy (and one of her girls ran round with one stalk of rhubarb as an umbrella, it was so big!).

I had a look at some recipes and decided that I would save some of the seeds and see if I could get some to grow for us, and make Rosehip Syrup with the rest.  The recipe didn't say to take the seeds out and as it's going through a jelly strainer, I didn't see the point in deseeding all of them anyway.

So the recipe, as per usual, has in itallics what actually happened.

1kg Rosehips (550g)
3 litres of boiling water (1.5 litres)
500g soft dark brown sugar (250g soft light brown sugar)

Bring to the boil 2 litres of the water (1 litre).


Put rosehips in a food processor until it's a pulp, then add to the water. WooHoo, from here I followed the instructions!

     

Bring the water back to the boil, remove from heat and allow to steep for 20 minutes.







Pour all into a scalded jelly bag and allow the juice to drip through. Squeeze the bag to get as much liquid as possible.









Add the pulp back to a saucepan containing 1 litre of water (500 ml) and bring back to the boil. Remove from the heat and steep for another 20 minutes before straining through the jelly bag again.  Not bothering to take these photos..... I'm sure you don't need to see the same pics again (but if you do, just look up a bit!)

Add sugar to the strained rosehip liquid, dissolve, allow to simmer for five minutes, then pour into hot, sterilised bottles.

Makes approximately 2 litres (made 1.4 litres)

Rhubarb jam

Using the pulp leftover from making a half batch of the Rhubarb cordial, I made some jam with a simple recipe (adapted from many out of my favourite cookbook that doesn't have a rhubarb jam recipe).

Equal measures of pulp to sugar - mine was 3 cups of pulp to 3 cups of sugar
orange peel - left in from the cordial to boil as flavour, but will remove when putting in jars
1.5 cups water
1/4 cup lemon juice

 

 

Bring to the boil briskly. then boil for 30 mins, or until setting point has been reached.

My favourite setting point test is to put a dollop on a plate and if you can draw a line through it and it doesn't join up again, it's okay.
Another test is the drip test.  When you dip a wooden spoon in, there are two drips hanging on instead of a waterfall effect.

 

 

Put in jars.

Rhubarb Cordial

one stalk = 486g!

I can't remember where I got this recipe from (not very helpful, I know!) but thought I'd give it a try because we have got a lot of rhubarb picked already and loads more growing!  There's only so much crumble one can eat!

I made rhubarb jam out of the leftover pulp - waste not, want not!

plus sugar

2kg Rhubarb chopped (one stalk weighed 486g!)

2 large Oranges
6 Star Anise (optional)
1.5 litres cold water
Citric Acid (optional to keep it for a long time, I couldn't find any) 

600g sugar

Boil rhubarb in water with 8 large strips of orange peel and juice of both oranges, leave to go to a pinky green mush.  

My pot wasn't big enough, so I did half at a time, I think I should have done it in 1/3 or 1/4 though.

Also, I think it must be the variety of rhubarb, because mine doesn't usually go pinky-green, so I just boiled it till it was mushy. 

 

 

 

 

Leave to cool. 

Yup, managed this step just fine!  Mental note:  Even halved, it's a lot of rhubarb, so it takes it's own sweet time to cool! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strain juice into another pan. 

I didn't have another pan, so I used my jam strainer & bowl and timed it right so that I went to work while it was dripping & I didn't have a chance to poke around and try and rush it! (I know me!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Put back on heat and add sugar and citric acid.  

1/2 batch pulp and juice separated

The instructions weren't 100% clear here, but I'm assuming it's just the juice I use and I just realised when I got to this point, that I didn't put in the star anise yet.  After a conflab with myself, I decided that I would use 3 star anise when I boiled up the second half of the batch, and then I'd have two different flavours (also not sure if I like star anise after whiffing the jar).

 

Put into bottles.  

 No problem! 

Raspberry Fool

As usual, what I used is in italics because you just know that I tweaked the recipe ..... again.

2 punnets raspberries (1/3 of what we picked last time - defrosted)
150g custard (440g tin because there was alot juice)
150g Greek style natural yoghurt (plus 2-3 dollops to thicken)
1/2t caster sugar (none, we're sweet enough!!)

Blend the raspberries and sieve out the pips (do you really think I did that!?)

I blended everything together in the real recipe and then added the extra custard & yoghurt to thicken it, because there was alot of raspberry juice and it was a bit runny.

Got a decent bowlful, which will do nicely for tonight and leftovers for tomorrow's picnic!  I don't know if it would freeze, I guess it would separate on defrosting - better to just eat it over two days!

Took about 5 minutes to make!

Rhubarb Wine

Firstly, I'm going to announce now that I have NEVER made any wine in my life!  (That covers off any fumbling that may or may not happen from now on!)  Since we inherited a couple of extra rhubarb plants and ours transplanted better than we could ever have imagined.... I thought I'd give it a bash.

The recipe I followed was from Tanya's blog, but I didn't have enough to make the full amount.  Never mind, I'm sure 3 bottles will be just grand!  If you want the full recipe now, check out her blog.  If you just want to see a learner bumble through, I'll be updating this as I go along.

Ingredients
1.15g rhubarb (you're going to love how I got to this!)
700g sugar
1.4 litres water, boiled
1.425 ml strong black tea, boiled & cooled
1t yeast nutrient
1/2 x 5g sachet white wine yeast 
santizer
extra water, boiled and cooled


10 July 2012
I had to halve the recipe and I'm a self-proclaimed one-pot cook.  Considering I was going to have to put the rhubarb into a sterile bowl and wash the rhubarb that's already two pots!  Eeek.  No speaking to me! (yup, seriously).

So, I got rougly the right amount of rhubarb balanced nicely on the scales, top and tailed them and chopped into small pieces, washed and into the bowl....

Then I weighed the scraps, deducted that from the original amount and that told me how much more I needed to add to the bowl (considering I have a close friend who uses pythagorus therum to line a cake tin, I can admit that I did this!)

The sugar then got stirred into the bowl with the rhubarb, which I then covered with clingfilm, hid in a cupboard and will now ignore it for 3 days.

See you in 3 days time!





15 July 2012
Okay, so it was longer than 3 days, but we got here!  Had to pop to the shop and collect the bits'n'pieces that we didn't have.  All sorted!

 Here's the mixture after sitting in the cupboard, I scooped out the pieces then drained the syrup through a seive to make sure there were no bits in there.

Here's the mixture with the cold tea and yeast added in.  Waiting patiently for 5 days now.

...and I mean 5 days this time!






23 July 2012
...In my calendar, this is 5 days.....

We had a bit of an issue with the racking - there was going to be too much water added to the demi-john and shouldn't be left half full, so it was a quick discuss with Tanya and decided that a bottle of Scrumpy would do the trick (but our shop didn't have any).... I was tempted to make a second half-batch, but we didn't have enough new rhubarb at the allotment.

I left Mike to sort out how to bung the new bottle out, because the bung was exactly the same diameter as the bottle now.  He did a very good job, as you will see!

This was a two person job, for one very good reason - I'm a rubbish syphoner!  Everything was sanitized first, using the instructions on the bottle and you should only syphon out the clear liquid so we've got a extension bit on the tube that has a hole a little way up to help with that.

This is the gunk that's left.  Nice, isn't it!

There was a bit of a gap at the top of the bottle so we topped up with boiled & cooled water.

Here it is, bung in - there is boiled & cooled water in the bong,so that the water was in the innermost bubbly bit and as the bottle was emptied of air (naturally) the water has been moving to the outer bubbly bit.

You can't see Mike's handiwork very well, but he cut a perfect sized hole in the lid for the bong and we sealed it with bluetack after the bottle was filled.

We now leave this for about a month (you already know that this'll be about a month + 3 days!)