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 ...

I can't believe it! I feel as if I have been being robbed, lied to and generally deceived. It's a conspiracy. They know what they are doing and they do it anyway. I wonder how they thought they'd ever get away with it? Maybe I'm to blame. Maybe we're all to blame. Who knows? But what is for sure is that it won't be happening anymore. What what what? What has happened? What happened was this. Today we mixed some plain flour and some water in a bowl, kneaded it a bit, left it a bit, rolled it out and dry fried it. And you know what happened? We made lovely, fresh, soft, tasty tortillas. It was easy. AND they tasted REALLY nice. I'm MAD. £1.69 it is for a pack of 6 Old El Paso tortillas. £1.69!!!!! It cost us about 25p to make the same amount. GRRRR. How can this have happened? At what point did we become so insecure of our cooking/baking skills and so dependent on other people making things to sell to us that someone worked out they would be able to sell something to us that is so cheap and easy to make yourself. Seriously it would take more effort ...

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 ...

From Vilnius we caught an over night train to St Petersburg. Our apartment was on the main street running through town, Nevsky Prospect or Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt as it is announced much to our amusement on the Metro. Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt! We had a fairly quiet first day really. We went to pick up the tickets for the next stage of the journey from our friend John. However when we got there he realised he'd lost them. Oops. Two tickets to Moscow thrown out with the rubbish. Luckily he was able to get them re-issued although it sounds as though it was a complete nightmare. Russians seem to have a great fondness for bureocracy. The process involved many forms,lots of signatures, much confusion and of course a fine. Something he tells us you get used to after a short time of living in Russia. It seems that as well as the liking for official documentation that corruption and bribes are very much an accepted part of everyday life. 30 kph over the speed limit? 300 rubles = no problem. While we were over at John's we went to the supermarket, where we bought some of the amazing salads the seem to sell pretty much ...