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.

Big bubbling pan of jam

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 packed full of plum trees, apple trees, damsons, raspberries and lots of other fruits free for anyone to come along and pick. You just have to find it… and I’m not going to spoil the fun by telling you where it is! I remember the excitement when I first stumbled across it, an adventurous off road sneaky peak through a gap in the hedge revealed something of a secret fruity garden tucked away. Magic.

So with our bags full of lovely fruit all we had to do was work out what to do with it. Here’s where Steph came in. With a growing reputation as Chorlton’s resident jam expert we arranged an early 9am start jam session scheduled to last just over an hour. We were having so much fun though that one thing led to another and 6 hours later we’d not only made 9 jars of jam(!),  but we’d also done a bread making lesson, made two loaves of bread, a lovely celery soup, soda bread, jam tarts, repotted several plants and done an experimental basil cutting.  Rock and Roll!

What a lovely way to spend a Thursday morning.

Steph and Andy

The jam making process it seems it quite straight forward really involving simply boiling up your fruit and adding more sugar than you could possibly imagine necessary then pouring it into sterilised jars to be sealed and labelled up. There’s plenty of books and websites about for you to find out how to do this (or you could just pop round to Steph’s ), so no need for me to go over it here, all I want to say is it’s great fun, very rewarding and reasonably easy. Do it!

Here’s a couple of Jam making websites

The basic method from Self-sufficient.co.uk
Lots of recipes from The Foody
Lots more recipes from Jam Recipes

And here’s a link to a book I’ve been enjoying reading at the moment, the River Cottage Preserves Handbook. This series of books (including Bread, Mushrooms, and Veg Patch) really does seem to be spot on, each one put together by one of the River Cottage’s relevant experts they go through everything you need to know right from the basics. Can’t wait to give the Hedgerow Jelly a go. It’s made with a mix of any foraged Hedgerow berries and crab apples. Or maybe the Bramley Lemon Curd, which sounds like a lovely wintery treat for toast. Mmm.

All I need now is a kitchen to do all this in, oh and a house to have a kitchen in, oh and a garden to grow all the fruit. Ahhh, one day. For now it’s foraged fruit and friends kitchens all the way. Not that that’s a bad thing, in fact it’s great fun. See nothing should stop you. You don’t even need your own fruit or a kitchen to make your own jam, just a nice friend and a sense of adventure.

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 to walk to the shop to buy some. It’s almost like someone convincing people to buy water when everyone knows it comes out of the tap. Oh…

Well anyway, I’ve worked it out! Ha! You won’t get me anymore. And what’s more I’m going to make it my mission to tell everyone else too. You won’t get away with this for much longer.

If the ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’ tags don’t draw you in, check out this list of ingredients:

INGREDIENTS:

Wheat Flour, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Stabiliser: Glycerol, Salt, Raising Agents: E450a, E500, Dextrose, Emulsifier: E471, Preservative: E202, Flour Treatment Agent: E920

Mutant food!

I don’t even know what most of that stuff is! I reckon they could release a batch with deadly poisons listed in the ingredients and no one would pick it up. Glycerol?? Do I want to eat that? Really? I have no idea? It sounds like an explosive. And numbers, lots of numbers. I don’t want to eat numbers. I want to eat food.

Here is the list of ingredients you need to MAKE YOUR OWN TORTILLAS. Hurrah!

Makes 8

250g plain white flour (plus extra for rolling out)

2g salt

150ml water.

So easy it’s hardly worth writing a proper recipe, but I’ll tell you once and then you’ll be off.

Put the flour in a bowl. Gradually add the water mixing it around with your fingers until you bring it together in a ball.

Knead for a few minutes.

Cover and leave to rest for about half an hour.

Divide in to 8 pieces, gently shape in to a rough ball and then roll out to about 2 or 3mm. While you are doing this put a good frying pan on a medium heat to heat up (no oil).

When the pan is hot put a tortilla in the pan, watch as it starts to bubble slightly as the underneath starts to brown (approx 30 seconds) then flip over and cook for another 30 seconds.

Stack them up as you cook them in a dry tea towel to keep them warm (the steam of the stacked warm tortillas keeps them soft).

Eat straight away, or wrap in tin foil to eat later (can be reheated later wrapped in foil in a low oven).

That’s it! And this recipe somehow still makes it seem more complicated than it really is. Honest.

A couple of other revelations:

Chapattis are made in much the same way, only use wholemeal or chapatti flour!

Nachos are basically tortillas cut up and deep fried. Officially they should be made with cornflour, but we gave it a go with plain and they made an equally good snack. Bit of salt, bit of spice shaking and you’re there.

What will I ‘discover’ next? Can you really make your own pasta? noodles? pizzas? soup? Of course you can. I’m onto you. I’m going to get my revenge… watch this space.

Please let me know if you read this and then make your own tortillas.
New tortilla makers count as of 7th July 2009: 9

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