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 ...

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 ...