chicks and chutney

Well, it's been a busy week for us here, chicks hatched all last week to a grand total of 9.... not bad for our first home hatched batch. All 9 of them are currently cheeping away happily in a warm box in the house, except when they are helping with knitting...

This is the oldest chick, the little black smudge from last week... they grow so quickly and we are very pleased at how strong they are.



This weekend marked the end of the apricot season for us, finally our huge tree had dropped her last fruit and we thought we would make the jam. I have been collecting, preparing and freezing apricots for weeks, using only the really squishy ripe ones to make ensure the best possible jam.

Our end result was this ...


Lovely thick, really tasty apricot jam.... 34 jars of it.... woo hoo!



We also felt this weekend was a good time to make our chutney. We used about 7 kg of tomatoes, 2kg of onions and 1.5 kg of apples... you can imagine, that makes a lot of chutney. This is it at the 'Giant Salad' stage, before it started to boil.... The recipe is here from last year

To make our jam we only used the sweetest ripest apricots, as that makes for tastier jam and we always like to keep it simple. By using the ripest apricots we used very little sugar as it didnt need much sweetning (added on a 'taste it and see' basis). We dont add artificial preservatives to our food, so, for the jam we took the cores and peel left from making the chutney and we boiled them in a pot and pressed them through a seive to extract the thick pulp and pectin mixture and we added this to the jam, it's a natural way to add a setting agent. Anyway, we dont like the jam too thick, we like it to be what my gran always calls 'french jam'. I am aware that this isnt a recipe, but it seems a little silly to pretend that we use a recipe just so I can blog about it.