Harvest Monday - courgettes and apples

So the gluts are upon us ...I usually stick to fairly similar (and easy) meals but being a bit adventurous in the kitchen can help make things more interesting.

I had a large courgette left from last week and decided to have a go at fritters - one of my friends had emailed me a link to a recipe on the Guardian website - the journalist had tried out loads of different recipes to come up with the best. On a bit of a whim I also decided to double the recipe and try freezing some... but having weighed everything out in double, when I came to mix in the four eggs it seemed really sloppy...at which point I realised I'd doubled everything except the courgette, aha. I only had one other small courgette picked and didn't have time to salt it (to remove excess water), so grated the courgette into the mix along with a big carrot, and crossed my fingers. Oh also the recipe had salad onions but I used red onion instead.

 

The original courgette, salted, left for 30 mins and pressed the water out

Hey, they turned out ok

Mmm

And there were enough to freeze too, here separated by grease proof paper

Other harvests have been quite nicely varied

A couple of small sweet peppers from the lean-to

These sorts of meals always look messy but taste good

Yesterday I got some more figs too, from my friends plot. They are so good, just eaten on their own.

I picked a couple more sweetcorn but one was past its best (kernels starting to shrivel) and so went straight in the compost

Earlier in the week I picked a small tub of blackberries. They're starting to 'go over' now but I've picked and frozen quite a lot already. Elsewhere in the countryside there'll be other varieties which are later than the ones on my plot.

A large bulk of my apples from the dwarf trees were ready to harvest, with the fruit coming away from the branch with a twist of the wrist. You can see some codling moth damage too. I gently cooked-up the blackberries with some of the damaged apples, adding a bit of old quince jelly as a sweetener. I hadn't been planning on harvesting the apples so didn't take my trolley down to the plot, which meant a rather heavy rucksack on the way home, oof.

We were heading to a friend's so I also made an apple scone round, from one of Jan's Great British Bake Off books. It only tastes 15 minutes to bake, which is a bonus.

Looks just like it eh, and tasted good too. I added a bit of extra cinammon plus some nutmeg

Out in the lean-to I've picked a big bowl of toms, it was quite hard to hold the bowl with one hand, so a very quick photo taken!

I think this might be the biggest tomato I've ever grown. It's big for me anyway.

And a pepper that really looks like a pepper. This was meant to be sweet but had a hotness to it as well, which although a surprise, actually made a nice flavour combination.

Here's some of the toms before I harvested, looking out the lounge window

Then after the harvest and a further thinning of the leaves. It doesn't look that different from this angle but I did get a big trug-ful of leaves (there are more plants to the left of this view). I've tried to be a bit organised and have sown some lettuce seeds in modules, to plant in the tomato pots when they're finished cropping.

Excitingly, the aubergines are getting going. These are on the top shelf of an old set of pine book shelves, so are above head-height.

In the back garden the beans are still going strong, some growing up a wigwam and others up the fence. Looks like I'll be harvesting these for a while longer.

It also helps that we finally got some rain this weekend, a decent few hours, hooray.

 

That's me for now, thanks for reading. I'm linking in with Harvest Monday kindly hosted by Dave at Our Hapoy Acres.

 

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