Harvesting and preserving

Last week I noticed the apples were ripening. This week I ended up with a small bucketful.

 

The apple trees are laden, but I thought it would be another few weeks until they ripened.

But when I realised some critter was eating them I investigated further.
Suddenly it was time to do something with them. I now have quite a lot of apple sauce. Great for on the oatmeal on these continuing cold mornings.

Then while I was on a roll I did a batch of tomato relish- a recipe I inherited from my mum.

 

When I got back to Canada in July, I started a new batch of sour dough starter. It always seems to take a while for the starter to get lively. The first few loaves are always a little solid.

But the starter is great now, and it is making me some great bread.

I am experimenting with using 1/2 cup of oat flour to replace some of the whole wheat spelt flour I used previously. So far so good. I've also replaced some of the whole wheat spelt with rye flour with good results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Todays harvest

Here is some of the harvest for tonight. Lots of beans and peas, and the first of the summer squash.

 

I have started to make sour dough bread. I have been making bread in a breadmaker for along time now. Recently I started to make it out of all spelt flour, as that is meant to be more healthy to eat.

That made nice bread.

But I have avoided making the even more healthy sour dough bread because,I wasn't sure it would work in the breadmaker(and I love my breadmaker).Since we returned to Canada in June, I have been playing around with making the sour dough starter and then making the bread. Everything I read suggested that making sour dough bread in a breadmaker wasn't that successful. With my first attempts,I fussed around, with the breadmaker hoping for the best. It turned out great from the start, and now I just throw the ingredients into the breadmaker as I used to for yeast bread, and have had consistently good results. I'll try and get my recipes up here for the starter and the bread.