ilultham

 I love just canning a few jars of fruit on an evening, often when writing in the kitchen.  I know I've said it so many times before but doing it like this, little and often, really does fill up the pantry! 

Because I've been doing some canning I decided I needed a few more shelves for our produce and had just the space left in the pantry for some. Not huge but enough to really increase the storage a little bit and keep it organised.  Luckily when I had just the right wood in mind for this project.  This wood has had a few lives already - many years ago - when I lived on the family farm and worked in site management (briefly) I was working on a site where two carpenters had come up with a problem. They were cladding a communal stairwell and had worked out they were massively short of timber - the manager ordered a load more  and pretty much none of it was needed (they were rubbish carpenters). So the next day I rocked up on site and the forklift driver was trying to smash it up by driving over it again and again so it would fit in the skip! So I managed to save a bit and put it in my car. It then stayed in a converted barn for the best part of a decade before being used as a ...

Managed to sneak enough tomatoes away from the kids to preserve some for winter!  I know it's not huge amounts but I'm going on the little and often approach. This time I used my small pot and did one at a time while I was doing other jobs in and around the kitchen. My big saucepan takes so long to heat up I though this might be better - in fairness when I started I only planned to do one!  In the end I managed to do some gerkins and some tomatoes.  Dead simple to do a small batch like this once I was set up as well! One really nice thing was when I started my younger daughter came in to make a cake at the same time - no idea how we survived in our tiny kitchen just a few years ago!  I followed the raw pack method for the tomatoes from the Ball Blue Book of canning. I think I'll have to sacrifice one jar next week so we can try them and see what they're like. It would be a shame to can loads and find out that I didn't like them like that! The tattler reusable lids a...