We went out with the apple picker yesterday and managed in five minutes to get this little lot, a total of 8 kgs of lovely Bramleys. Which according to mysupermarket.co.uk would have cost us an average of £1.75 a kilo, which means our five minutes of fun with the apple picker stick thingy saved us a grand total of £14.
We had lots of fun because the trees are tall and the apples are still firmly attached, and the only way to get them down was with the pole at full stretch and whacking the apples with the end of it. Meaning of course, that the person doing the picking up of the apples off the grass had to duck and dive to get out of the way of these falling missiles.
I'll be processing them later today into some more jars of chunky apple sauce, which can be used for pies, crumbles etc throughout next year and a few Apple Turnovers to pop into the freezer, as I have a packet of pastry in the fridge that needs using up.
Over the weekend we had a couple of salady style meals and instead of serving them with 'normal' mayonnaise I decided to pep things up a bit with some garlic mayo. Totally cheaty and easy to do with a squirt of garlic paste stirred into normal mayonnaise
We also on occasion have 'chilli mayonnaise' by adding a squirt of Sweet Chilli Sauce. Mayonnaise can also be mixed with tomato ketchup to make 'Marie Rose' sauce, just mix it to taste.
After all why have lots of different flavours of mayonnaise opened in your fridge at once when you can simply have one jar of mayo and use the condiments in your storecupboard to pep things up from time to time.
Buying any of these variations ready made will cost you more than the total sum of doing it yourself and you don't take up extra space, or risk things going out of date in the fridge.
I simply buy whatever Hellmann's mayonnaise is on offer at the time, sometimes it's the squirty bottles but it's usually I try to stock up with the big jars which are so much easier to get every last little bit out of ... and of course I get the jar to keep for preserving.
Of course I could make my own mayo, but with all the busyness of harvesting and preserving that has been going on here just lately I have completely gotten out of the habit of doing it. Although it doesn't take long, just a couple of minutes to gather together your ingredients and then whizz up for 10 seconds with a stick blender .... if you follow the recipe that is on my 'Recipes I Use Regularly' page at the top of the blog.
Sue xx
