Homegrown vegetable stock mix

My 4 jars of vegetable stock mix

When making soups, stews, sauces etc. it is handy to be able to add a bit of stock to add more flavour. The stock cubes you buy in the shops are full of additives and preservatives, and it can be time consuming to make your own stock from scratch. This is where vegetable stock mix comes in. I first read about it in the "River Cottage Preserves Handbook." You use it pretty much the same way you would a stock cube, just add 2tsp of the mix to a pint of boiling water and you have a full flavoured vegetable stock.

Making the mix is very straightforward once you have a food processor or a blender. The ingredients for this mix are pretty flexible. I have chosen these because they are the vegetables we grew this year and I wanted to make it as homegrown as possible. You can use whatever vegetables are in season, on special in the supermarker or you have lying in the fridge. Just try to keep the veg to salt ratio about the same and you should be fine. The salt preserves the vegetables to stop them going off so if you increase the amount of veg increase the amount of salt proportionately. For my mix I used:

Some of my veg for the mix

250g of leek
200g of onion
200g of carrot
200g of turnip
100g of runner beans
A few sun dried tomatoes
A few cloves of garlic
A bunch of parsley, thyme and sage
250g of salt



The method for this recipe is simple. Roughly chop your selection of veg and put it into a food processor. Blend the veg until it is a grainy paste like consistency. I put in the veg in stages because it wouldn't all fit in at once.

From this

To this

Then add the salt and herbs to the mix and blend again until all thoroughly mixed and blended together. Then put this mix into sterilised jars. This should keep for 6 months in a cool dry place. I normally keep a one jar in the fridge and store the others at the back of the press somewhere. When using the mix, do so before seasoning, then taste the soup or sauce after adding it because there is a lot of salt in the mix and you usually don't need to season it any further.

This recipe is very easy to do and you probably only need to do it twice or three times a year to keep yourself in homemade stock that isn't full of artificial flavours and preservatives.

Elderberry Wine and Prosciutto

Sounds very fancy doesn't it? Well I finally got around to picking my elderberries, in the rain, nothing fancy about that. I had already picked some blackberries last week and put them in the freezer. So I took them out last night and this morning I got down to making some elderberry wine and some blackberry wine.

The kitchen takeover

I got my recipe from Andy Hamilton's "Booze for Free." His recipe is for a blend of elderberry and blackberry wine. I decided to make two separate batches to try them on their own and blended together. The recipe is as follows:

2kg of elderberries/blackberries
1.5kg of sugar
4litres of water
Juice of one lemon
1tsp of pectolase
1 Campden tablet
1tsp of yeast nutrient
sachet of red wine yeast

I started the yeast with the yeast nutrient and some sugar in a cup of warm water to get it started. I then added the berries to the fermentation bin and mashed them with a potato masher to get some juice out. Then added the sugar and 1 litre of boiling water and stirred until the sugar dissolved. I then added the remaining ingredients and the yeast mixture. I also added a cup of strong tea to the blackberry mixture. This increases the tannins in the wine, but is not needed in the elderberry wine as there is already plenty of tannin present.

The yeast, sugar and yeast nutrient mixture

The blackberry wine in the fermentation bin

I then set the two fermentation bins beside a radiator to ferment. I put the lid loosely fitting on one and a tea towel over the over because it doesn't have a lid, or at least I can't find it. I put them there at about midday today and I have just checked them now at 7pm, no bubbles yet but there is a distinctive "homebrew smell" in the room. Hopefully there will be some fermentation signs in the morning. I will post another blog with more information when I am going to rack the wine into demijohns and post a link here.

EDIT: Here is the link to the update on the wines

All set for the yeast to do it's stuff

My next job of the morning was one I have been meaning to do for almost a year. When we got the pigs killed and butchered last year I set aside a half leg of pork to make prosciutto (or Parma ham). We got the pigs back from the butchers just before Christmas and I didn't have time to cure and hang the leg of pork. Then the summer came along and I didn't want to hang meat in the hot weather. It now looks like any risk of hot weather has passed for the year so I finally got around to it. I got my recipe from Michael Ruhlman's great book "Charcuterie; The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing." It is a relatively simple recipe. It involves rubbing as much salt as necessary into the meat. I used about a kilo of salt. It was enough to get it all well covered in salt, concentrating on the parts where the flesh was exposed and rubbing some into the skin. I then placed the leg into a plastic container.

The salted leg of pork

The recipe says the it needs to be left in the salt for 1 day per 500g. My half leg of pork was a little under 3kg so it should be ready to come out in about 6 days. It says to keep an eye on it, remove liquid that comes from the meat and reapply salt as necessary. The recipe was for a full leg of pork, 6 or 7 kilos, so I will have to play it by ear a little with the timing I think. It also said it needs to be weighted with about 5 kilos on top of the leg. I don't know if this is related to the size of the leg or not but I have knocked together a weight on top of the leg in the fridge as you can see below.

When this comes out from the fridge in about a week it needs to be hung for a few months to air dry. The ideal location is 15 deg C and 60-70% humidity. I am thinking of hanging it in a cold room in the house which should be something close to those conditions. **here is the update on the prosciutto**

Yesterday I planted out a few potatoes that we saved from our early potatoes this year. They have gone into large pots in the polytunnel so hopefully we should have some fresh potatoes for Christmas dinner. I have never tried this before so I don't know it will work and it is probably fairly weather dependant. I have also started work on building my cider press. I have taken a few photos so far and the plan is to have a post about the cider press being built. Of course if the press doesn't work I will deny that I ever attempted to build one. But hopefully I will have it built by the weekend and the post up Sunday or Monday.

Until then.

My garden as it stands

I decided for my first blog post I would give a few pictures of my garden to have a starting point so the blog can follow it along as it changes. First off is the polytunnel, I decided to clear out all of this years crops today to make room for some winter salad crops. I found a few bits and pieces while clearing out so they are currently forming a chutney on the hob, the greenery went to the hens and compost pile.

The tunnel this morning

The tunnel this evening

I have already cleared our two raised beds of onions and half of the deeper bed of carrots. The parsnips are still there I will probably leave them there for another month or so, until the weather gets a bit colder. We have put in a few lettuce plants after the onions, probably too many to eat but the hens will get the rest. Here is a picture of the three beds. The parsnips are in the far bed as that is the deeper one. 

This year we made use of the additional growing space in what was the pig run last year. It will have pigs again next year, we decided to take a break from pigs for a year but I can't wait to get them back next spring. I have enjoyed the extra space for growing though so we will need to see if we can find extra space for growing veg next year. This year we grew potatoes, runner beans, peas, sweetcorn, brussel sprouts, swedes, broccoli, purple sprouting broccoli and cauliflower in the pig run. So I will really miss the space next year. I might have to build a few more raised beds next year.

The end of the pig run where the potatoes were

The pig run with mostly winter veg left

Beside the pig run we have the hen house and hen run. This is where we keep the laying flock of hens and ducks. We currently have 9 hens and 4 ducks. I have plans to add the breeding birds from the meat flock in here over winter to save the grass in the garden, and to make it easier for feeding.

Hens and ducks from the laying flock

The hen house, freshly cleaned today (kind of why I included the picture)

This was my first year keeping chickens for meat. I got 12 day old La Bresse in May, it turned out to be 7 cockerels and 5 hens. I kept them under heat until they were ready to go outside. I set up a pen with electric poultry netting on the lawn. I moved this around so the grass didn't get too worn anywhere. 3 of the cockerels are now residing in the freezer, so there is now 5 hens and 4 cockerels in the pen. I plan to keep the 5 hens and 2 of the cockerels for breeding next year. I will probably put them in with the laying hens over winter and seperate them in the spring for breeding. Otherwise I think the grass will turn to mud. I might use the electric poultry netting to let them out on some grass when the weather allows.

Some of the La Bresse in their electric netting run

 Today I also took in my harvest of cooking apples. This was mainly because I needed them for the chutney recipe. This was about 1 kg of apples haha. Well I did only plant the trees this spring so I am not too disappointed about that. I planted one bramley apple tree, one gala apple tree, two cox's orange pippin trees, two plum trees (one died), and I also have two pear trees which are in pots at the minute as I haven't cleared the ground for them just yet. There is also a crab apple tree beside the shed.

The Fruit Trees

Well that seems to cover most of the garden, I did say it was crowded! That is about it for today. I will probably be picking some elderberries during the week to make wine. I will probably make a blackberry wine, an elderberry wine and maybe a blend if I have enough fruit. 

Until then.