Category: Preserves

  • Garlic scape pickle recipe

    Here at Legge Towers the weather has been just gorgeous since May. Which has made up somewhat for the slow and cold start to the year. We had to resow courgettes when the first lot sown in early March on heat succumbed to the less than stunning early May temperatures. So we’ve worked really hard…

  • Mustard greens, fermented and more

    I wish I’d got to know mustard greens (and reds and goldens) much earlier in my growing adventure. They are such a tasty, versatile and good-hearted vegetable. And some of the varieties are great green manures, ground cover and biofumigants. Here at Legge Towers we sow them in mid to late summer so that we…

  • How to grow beer

    All you need is a few hop plants (humulus lupulus), some malt and sugar, water and the help of Andy Hamilton. At the end of the summer, we had loads of the female flowers which are the hops on our plants. So we stripped them and dried them on a rack on top of the…

  • Currant ‘champagne’ recipe – quick fizz

    If you want a fizz that tastes spectacular, this recipe is for you. In under a month you get the full bright fruity taste of currants with a mildly mouth puckering tart-tannin background. The aroma is the wonderful woodland smell of crushed currant leaves. All this surrounded with lively & youthful fizz. I’m delighted with…

  • Three-cornered leek recipes

    This box arrived courtesy of a very generous Lindsay on Twitter. Lindsay has a wonderful surfeit of these in Devon and needed an ID for it. She also wanted to be rid of some and so one thing led to another. It’s allium triquetrum or three-cornered leek (aka three-cornered garlic). It’s so called because of…

  • Sourdough cider

    When I saw on twitter that my Twitter chum Julia Moore had: Decided adding #sourdough culture to some of our freshly pressed apples would be one experiment too far I was intrigued and showed her my Bouza bread beer experiment post. Despite my references to ‘vomit’, Julia changed her mind and took up the challenge.…

  • Apple Day Recipes

    Today is the day to celebrate the wonderful variety and bounty that apples give us. To help us celebrate, here’s a list of some of my favourite recipes. Apple recipes Apple cider vinegar A doddle to make, very healthy for you and lots of fun. You can use damaged apples, or scraps. So this is…

  • Orange & coffee liqueur recipe

    Delightfully simple to make: satisfyingly complex to taste. That sums up this grand liqueur which you could make now and enjoy over the festive season. If you can bear to part with some, it’d make an ideal present for a very special person. The aroma of the brew is what a perfect sunset should smell…

  • How to make vanilla extract

    This is so simple to do, you’ll wonder why you ever spent the money on the shop stuff. The picture shows my 500ml bottle of vanilla extract. Here’s how I make it… Method Take 6 to 8 vanilla pods and split them with a sharp knife, leaving them just attached at one end. Pop them…