Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas this year, and probably for every year from now on... Homemade jam! Hurrah! After years of wanting to join in the fun but being too afraid of the huge pans of molten fruit involved, which I imagined would throw great blobs of sugary lava all over my face causing permanent jam splatter scars, I have, under the expert guidance of a friend, finally gone for it and cooked up an enormous pan of lovely plum and apple jam. [caption id="attachment_1581" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Big bubbling pan of jam"][/caption] As an added bonus all of the fruit collected was free, collected from various sites around Chorlton Ees. Anyone who's familiar with the Ees will no doubt have noticed the area around Hardy Farm has dozens of apple trees all laden with hundreds of apples which are  ripe for the picking right now. So long as you're not expecting to find supermarket style perfectly symmetrical shiny unblemished apples there's probably more than enough for anyone who fancies to go fill as many carrier bags as they can carry. The plums were from another less well known site on the Ees, the Community Orchard. The Orchard is perhaps an acre of land ...

Not that I'd usually want to spoil the ending of a story, but I couldn't wait to show this - Rachel's first loaf of bread, fresh out of the oven at the end of our first venture into bread making workshops. Perfect, light and crusty. Wow! [caption id="attachment_1542" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Perfect!"][/caption] It was a pretty amazing day really. In the space of an afternoon we managed to make a plain white loaf, a dozen rolls, bread sticks, a focaccia, tortilla wraps and some nachos! All turned out great. Rachel certainly was a natural - she has great baking hands. Watching Rachel and Andy's synchronised dough kneading it was difficult to tell who was teaching who. [caption id="attachment_1521" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Synchronised bread making"][/caption] Even the kids got stuck in. Beth helped cut dough into strips to make bread sticks, which Ellie then did a marvellous job of shaping and adding grated cheese to make them extra tasty. [caption id="attachment_1534" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Beth makes bread sticks sticks"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1536" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Beth and Ellie make the breadstick shapes and sprinkle cheese"][/caption] Even little Lily helped, she made the important decision that lemons were indeed too yakky to be added to the mix. [caption id="attachment_1520" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Lily discovers lemons are ...

Sustain has recently launched the Real Bread Campaign. The website has a fantastic map which you can use to locate real bread producers in your area (or add your own bakery!). Brilliant. There's also lots of information on there about what real bread is and why we should be eating it including what is wrong with industrially produced bread. This campaign is not about making it easier for a few people to have the luxury of going out to buy fancy artisan bread. Bread is a fundamental part of our diet, three quarters of all people have it as part of their diet every day, and as such it is vitally important that the bread we eat is good for us. Industrial milling breaks the grains down in a way that destroys many of it's nutritional qualities, so much so that vitamins have to be added back into the mix by law. These re-added vitamins are more difficult (or impossible?) for our bodies to take in than those that were originally naturally present but that the industrial process has removed. Other aspects of the way most bread is produced makes it all but impossible for some people to digest properly. There's ...

Here's a quick recipe for you, lifted straight from Guardian website, and for once made with no alterations so definitely deserving of credit and a link, it's an amazing cauliflower and sweet potato curry, "Leon Gobi". I first saw it in the paper as an extract from Allegra McEvedy's new book, "Leon, Ingredients and Recipes for the Good Life". Despite it's fairly long list of ingredients, it's really easy to make, and incredibly tasty. I saw the book in the shops yesterday and I have to say it looks pretty tasty too. I wanted to hug it (erm is that it bit strange?). It's one of those big chunky books with unfinished paper, loads of beautiful retro illustrations and quirky pages with bits and pieces that you can take out. None of this really has anything to do with food and it being a cookbook I suppose you'd probably prefer to know whether or not the recipes are any good before you'd decide to go buy it. All I can say is that if this recipe is anything to go by then it definitely will be. I was too busy stroking the pages and drooling over the quirky design to actually ...

Mushroom season is here. Hurrah! I'm not sure if it's normal, but the floors up here seem to be carpetted with them too, hurrah! We've seen over 55 different types so far. I'm thinking of starting a new section on here devoted to my little friends, so if I can work out how to do it I'll be posting all the different types we find plus notes on edibility, habitat etc.  But obviously don't believe anything I say, we use three different books, which though generally a good mix, cross referenced say different things sometimes and I don't want to be responsible for anyone else's poisoning. The books we are currently using are the Collins Gems "Mushrooms", which is great, has good, clear pictures, pretty much all the common things you are likely to see and references similar mushrooms things can be confused with, then "Mushrooms" by Roger Phillips, which is really comprehensive, but maybe a little too much so when you're just starting out, it's best to look for things in the little book first and then check there's nothing else simlar in this one. We also have the River Cottage "Mushrooms" (all these people clearly spend days trying to ...