Monday Cookery Mumblings

The plums are ready!!!! So thats my week taken care of  .. lol   Plums for the freezer, plums for jam , plum tart for tea, it just goes on and on, but it is my favourite glut of the year , theyre a weird french variation on the Victoria variety , theyre a joy because you just split them and the stone falls out .
Apples are still ripening well , i have a triple tree with three varietys on one rootstock and this is the first year the cookers have fruited , both the eaters have fruited for years and allthough its a small tree it has a severe lean where the wind has hammered it off the fields . No amount of staking has ever cured this so now it just does its own thing .
The double variety pear is glutting this year the branches are on the ground but that does take the weight off a bit and they will be a few weeks yet .
Autumn raspberries are just starting to come into fruit
It makes it sound like i have acres but i dont theyre all on a small rootstock so you can cram them in , but i find 4 trees is enough for a family and a rampant do its own thing raspberry patch .
Now heres a tale of thriftyness gone mad , now i used to make quite a lot of jam , now i just make a few jars for me and Mr Bah Humbug , the reason?  the kids will only eat Value mixed fruit jam bunch of philistines .
One year being stony broke and having a fruit glut i decided to jam myself to death , but i was broke and the price of sugar is horrendous , so I looked all over the internet for the way to make sugar beet into sugar for jam , it was quite common to do this during the war and you can pick free sugarbeet up at every sharp corner lying on the roadside  out here in the wilderness. I roped in my teen slaves to peel and grate dozens of sugarbeet and then started boiling up batches , this was the point when i realised it stank to high heaven , the thought hadnt crossed my mind even though i used to live down wind of a sugar factory , but it was to late to turn back now .
 Once it had strained we had gallons of murky syrup which if i had thought about it i could have boiled down and made jam with . But being me i decided i wanted it to resemble sugar , the only way i could think of drying it , was to put it in the greenhouse in practically every container i owned and cover it with clingfilm to keep out insects ..........I got up next morning to find i was the Ant Queen of Lincolnshire , nothing stops them , maybe thats why the kids only eat Value jam?