Sunday, 2 January 2011

Saturday 1st January 11

Well a late start as we went to bed at 3am, but had a good day with a bit of logpile stacking, some compost bin filling, pruning brambles, to give me a layer of carbon rich/aeration material, and sorting out stuff for drying.

Later, I had a go at making 'raspapple', as Richard gave me about 9 punnets of raspberries yesterday, which were unsaleable as some of the fruit was going off.  Gill sorted out enough to make a little pie, leaving me the rest... I removed the worst ones and brought the rest up to the boil on the woodstove, and sieved off the juice.  I then put the pulp back on the stove with a bit of water, and after this had come to the boil, sieved it again, giving me a cup of raspberry juice.  Then I got a load of already dried apple rings, which I have a lot of, and in small batches, put them in the juice to soak up a bit of raspberry flavour.  I then put these for redrying on the rack on the stove.

I cut up the banana and cranberry leather which had fully dried... in fact, some bits had got to the crunchy stage, which isn't what I wanted, as it should be leathery.  So I got a jar full of these strips, and some extra bits which didn't fit.  I invited my boys to try these offcuts and got a big thumbs up. 

So a quiet and pleasant day. No hiccups, no hassles, quite productive.

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