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Unwelcome Harvest
I went elderberry-picking on Friday, having noticed some on my way home the previous weekend. I got fairly thoroughly nettle-stung around the ankles despite the fact that the path had been recently strimmed back (if not for one bow-shot on either side, than at least for six feet), but the harvest was disappointing; a lot of the berries had already gone over, and were withered on the bough or else had been picked off/knocked off already by birds, and the remaining sprays had a significant proportion of unripe fruit.
The worse the quality of the berry sprays, the slower it is to strip them off, since you can't just draw a fork down the whole thing in order to scrape free the ripe fruit, but have to cherry-pick the good berries while avoiding the unripe ones (and in particular the over-ripe and shrivelled ones). I got two smallish bags full, and spent Friday evening cleaning the fruit from the first batch. I ended up with about enough elderberries to fill a pie-dish.
I've just spent a second evening cleaning the remainder of the berries I'd picked, and, at the final stage of trying to remove as many of the little 'stick-y bits' as I could, was dismayed to discover rather a high proportion of white maggots emerging from among the dark berries. You always get a certain amount of wildlife brought home with you, and I think I found a few larvae in the first batch of berries as well, even though I did try to leave behind the overripe ones -- but this went above two or three to the stage of finding several dozen, and they just kept coming out as I turned the fruit over and over.
I tried filling the bowl with water and leaving it for an hour or so in the hopes that this would create a general exodus, but it didn't seem to have any effect at all; of course I couldn't use salt water, as one would with salad, because I wanted to eat the berries as a dessert afterwards. However, as soon as I drained the water yet more wiggly white inhabitants started reappearing, apparently from *inside* the fruit. I'm afraid they'd almost certainly been hatching and developing during the extra day's wait, even though I left the spare berries inside the fridge; they were very probably in the first batch as well but at a less developed stage, although I think the proportion of overripe fruit was lower in that bag, which was picked at a different site.
At this point I was almost tempted just to ditch the lot, as I'd found so many maggots that it was clear that however many I removed, there would inevitably be more emerging. However, since it meant throwing away two days' work, I decided to cook the remaining berries instead (I'd been planning to freeze them raw for future use), on the grounds that this would
So I put them in the saucepan, and duly removed a further batch of live inhabitants which writhed violently in escape as the berries began to break down. I'm afraid there will definitely be some that got cooked in amongst the fruit -- but then there were very probably some amongst the last batch, and the pie (when I didn't know about them) was delicious...
It's a recipe for a 'fruit flan' from the 500 Cookery Hints -- fairly generic, in that it doesn't give any exact oven temperatures or directions, other than specifying 4oz of pastry for the pie-plate and 1 tsp of sugar for the meringue topping. I used pre-cooked elderberries in order to avoid having too much juice, then worried that the filling might dry out while I was baking the meringue...
It's only a single egg white to cover the entire pie, so it's a pretty thin layer. (I did put in more than a teaspoon of sugar, since there wasn't a lot of sweetening in the fruit, and meringue normally has a higher proportion of sugar to give it body.)
The sweet pastry included a lump of beef dripping in lieu of lard, and I did wonder if it would end up with a meaty aroma once cooked -- it smelt disconcertingly beefy when being rubbed in. But in fact it was extremely tasty, and didn't have any discernable meat flavour after baking was complete. In the photo you can see where I'd broken off edges of the pie to eat like shortbread on their own!
I counted the total number of chilli fruits on my three-and-a-bit plants. I now have 30 green chillies (which are still showing no real signs of turning red, though the tomatoes are ripening en masse), although none of the recent flowers seem to have set, so that's probably it for the coming year. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to store these chillies, as they are much larger than the ones in my current pot.
I've now had quite a lot of ripe tomatoes (I must remember to save the seeds from at least one of the towel-tomatoes!) and am reasonably happy with them; I'm not sure if the later fruits actually taste of more, or if my expectations have just been lowered :-p The three transplanted tomato plants (which certainly didn't suffer from being transplanted with fruit on) are still flowering -- and, apparently, setting, although I cannot imagine that the currently thumbnail-sized fruits will come to much at this end of the year.
I have my first blue Swan River daisy, which has just made it into flower at the start of the autumn. (I am a little concerned about whether it's going to have time to set seed for next year, though...)
The worse the quality of the berry sprays, the slower it is to strip them off, since you can't just draw a fork down the whole thing in order to scrape free the ripe fruit, but have to cherry-pick the good berries while avoiding the unripe ones (and in particular the over-ripe and shrivelled ones). I got two smallish bags full, and spent Friday evening cleaning the fruit from the first batch. I ended up with about enough elderberries to fill a pie-dish.
I've just spent a second evening cleaning the remainder of the berries I'd picked, and, at the final stage of trying to remove as many of the little 'stick-y bits' as I could, was dismayed to discover rather a high proportion of white maggots emerging from among the dark berries. You always get a certain amount of wildlife brought home with you, and I think I found a few larvae in the first batch of berries as well, even though I did try to leave behind the overripe ones -- but this went above two or three to the stage of finding several dozen, and they just kept coming out as I turned the fruit over and over.
I tried filling the bowl with water and leaving it for an hour or so in the hopes that this would create a general exodus, but it didn't seem to have any effect at all; of course I couldn't use salt water, as one would with salad, because I wanted to eat the berries as a dessert afterwards. However, as soon as I drained the water yet more wiggly white inhabitants started reappearing, apparently from *inside* the fruit. I'm afraid they'd almost certainly been hatching and developing during the extra day's wait, even though I left the spare berries inside the fridge; they were very probably in the first batch as well but at a less developed stage, although I think the proportion of overripe fruit was lower in that bag, which was picked at a different site.
At this point I was almost tempted just to ditch the lot, as I'd found so many maggots that it was clear that however many I removed, there would inevitably be more emerging. However, since it meant throwing away two days' work, I decided to cook the remaining berries instead (I'd been planning to freeze them raw for future use), on the grounds that this would
- sterilise the fruit
- help drive out the inhabitants when they felt the heat
- at least turn any cooked maggots purple, so that they wouldn't be any more detectable than the little stalks among the berries; after all, they are not actually poisonous, and it's the wriggling that is so unpleasant :-(
So I put them in the saucepan, and duly removed a further batch of live inhabitants which writhed violently in escape as the berries began to break down. I'm afraid there will definitely be some that got cooked in amongst the fruit -- but then there were very probably some amongst the last batch, and the pie (when I didn't know about them) was delicious...
It's a recipe for a 'fruit flan' from the 500 Cookery Hints -- fairly generic, in that it doesn't give any exact oven temperatures or directions, other than specifying 4oz of pastry for the pie-plate and 1 tsp of sugar for the meringue topping. I used pre-cooked elderberries in order to avoid having too much juice, then worried that the filling might dry out while I was baking the meringue...
It's only a single egg white to cover the entire pie, so it's a pretty thin layer. (I did put in more than a teaspoon of sugar, since there wasn't a lot of sweetening in the fruit, and meringue normally has a higher proportion of sugar to give it body.)
The sweet pastry included a lump of beef dripping in lieu of lard, and I did wonder if it would end up with a meaty aroma once cooked -- it smelt disconcertingly beefy when being rubbed in. But in fact it was extremely tasty, and didn't have any discernable meat flavour after baking was complete. In the photo you can see where I'd broken off edges of the pie to eat like shortbread on their own!
I counted the total number of chilli fruits on my three-and-a-bit plants. I now have 30 green chillies (which are still showing no real signs of turning red, though the tomatoes are ripening en masse), although none of the recent flowers seem to have set, so that's probably it for the coming year. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to store these chillies, as they are much larger than the ones in my current pot.
I've now had quite a lot of ripe tomatoes (I must remember to save the seeds from at least one of the towel-tomatoes!) and am reasonably happy with them; I'm not sure if the later fruits actually taste of more, or if my expectations have just been lowered :-p The three transplanted tomato plants (which certainly didn't suffer from being transplanted with fruit on) are still flowering -- and, apparently, setting, although I cannot imagine that the currently thumbnail-sized fruits will come to much at this end of the year.
I have my first blue Swan River daisy, which has just made it into flower at the start of the autumn. (I am a little concerned about whether it's going to have time to set seed for next year, though...)