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Spiced Mead

Spiced Mead, eat well on universal credit

Well it might not be food, but it’s home made! Strangely the local supermarket had a load of jars of Honey at 49p a jar in January. It was apparently close to it’s ‘Best before date’! Honey by it’s very nature is one of the few food items which are not dried which will never go off. But their loss is our gain…..

Ingredients:-

4 x 400ml jars of runny Honey
1 Cinnamon Stick, snapped in half
2 Thumb sized lumps of Ginger, peeled
4 Cloves
1 Sachet of (Polish shop) Dry fast acting Yeast
Water
Liquid Finings sachet

Method:-

(1) Bung all the ingredients in a demijohn with enough water to allow a little head space.
(2) With your hand over the opening, give it all a good shake.
(3) Place a bung and air-trap in the neck.
(4) Make sure it doesn’t make a mess through the air-trap for the first week of fast fermentation. If so clean the outside for the demijohn.
(5) Pop in a cupboard and check the water level in the air-trap once in a while.
(6) Leave it alone until the air-trap stops bubbling.
(7) Decant using a pipe into another large bottle and sterilize the demijohn ( If you can’t get hold of proper tablets, Denture tablets work perfectly! )
(8) Rinse the demijohn well and then return the Mead.
(9) Add liquid finings ( You can buy these on-line for very little. )
(10) Allow to clear for 24 hours.
(11) Decant into seal-able bottles.
(12) At this stage it will be good. Give it a few months to mature and it will be better.

We tried a small tipple each before adding the finings. It’s very warming. I suspect as there is quite a sweetness that it has brewed out to 11 to 12 %, which is the best ( Or worst! ) you can expect from this sort of Yeast. It’ll be a treat tipple. Not for drinking by the pint, as we’re likely to loose days of our lives if we did!!!!!!!


 

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Garden Pond recipe

The tale behind this oddity is nearly a silly as the end result.......

I went on my morning forage to the discounts isle yesterday and spotted some interesting looking sausages. Your standard low cost sausages are off the menu for us as they use Wheat Flour as a packer. On Wednesday evening we’d made a tray bake and the ludicrous question appeared in my mind “What would you call a combination of a giant Yorkshire pudding Toad In The Hole and a Tray Bake?” I came up with Garden Pond! We had all sorts of bits and bobs of vegetables which really needed using up so after joking with Sue I quickly scuttled back to the Supermarket and bought said sausages.

We didn’t have a great deal on yesterday afternoon so a silly idea soon developed into a full scale project. I foraged a few extra fresh herbs to dress the dish and Garden Pond was born! The planting around the pond is Sage, a Ruby Chard flower and Rosemary. The water lillies are Tomatoes, Sage leaves and Chive flowers. In the middle of the pond you can just see Sue Carrot Coy Carp!

Clearly we don’t expect anybody else to try this at home. But if you can’t get the kids to eat their veg a slightly more sane version would make a great talking point and possible incentive…. Nothing was wasted and we finished it this evening.

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