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Our usual spot for blackberry picking wasn’t exactly heaving with mellow fruitfulness this year, but we managed to harvest enough for a couple of jars of jam before S. was distracted by a gate with a sign reading DANGER BULL IN FIELD. The danger bull, much to our disappointment, was nowhere to be seen.
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It took me about three years to make a decent pizza. My earliest efforts contained far too much dough and were much too thick. My problems were compounded by attempting to bake the pizzas on the serving dish pictured above, to which, unsurprisingly, they would unfailingly stick (and which, incidentally, was purloined for me by […]
While I realise that dried thyme has its adherents, I take the view that it is better preserved, outside the growing season, in the freezer.
As well as capturing more of the herb’s aromatic qualities, freezing thyme in a box like the one pictured above has the singular advantage of making it very easy to use when needed.
If you leave the thyme on the stem, the individual leaves are very easily shaken loose when frozen. So, when you need a teaspoonful for your mashed potatoes, you just take out your freezer box, perform a quick, maraca-style shake, and said quantity can be scooped from the bottom of the box with serene ease.
Hence today’s annual harvest, which left the plant with enough growth to stage a recovery in the spring, not to mention an endearing resemblance to Ernie from Sesame Street.
I am indebted to Shrewd Food for the nobly simple and obvious concept of “fruit bowl jam”.
The idea is that you spare, from their fate on the compost heap, the dubious and imperfect specimens that tend to lurk at the bottom of the fruit bowl towards the end of the week, and use them to make small quantities of what may speculatively be termed “jam”.
I used five or six nectarines d’un certain âge and a fistful of sugar to make an admittedly runny preserve (I’m not sure how much pectin there is in nectarines, relatively speaking), which may not have been ideally suited to toast, but which nonetheless served to enliven my porridge for the rest of the week.
And enlivening one’s porridge is surely, in this day and age, an uncontroversial delight.
