Homemade stuff

As per the perverse way of ugly plants producing fruit that nobody likes much, the rhubarb plant in the garden in Caversham had done extremely well for the last few years, producing loads of fruit, some of which is still languishing in bags in the freezer. Back in May Ruth made the decision to get rid of it in the interests of freeing up space to grow other things we might be more inclined to eat and, as I balked at the thought of yet more frozen rhubarb filling up the freezer, she got the idea to try and make wine out of the remaining fruit. This led to the purchase of a good deal of kit from a company amusingly named Bigger Jugs. Here's the initial stage of the chemistry, with chunks of rhubarb soaking in one of the supplied fermenting bins:

And below in its current state, which is a peachy-orange liquid. The space it's in just happened to be an available space in the kitchen, but it's perhaps unfortunately placed next to various cleaning products. Hopefully it will, in due course, taste better than those, but I'm not overly hopeful. Apparently it's supposed to rest in its demijohn for at least six months, so we're anticipating a sampling of rhubarb wine sometime around Christmas.

Second bit of River Cottage-type industry: the tomato plant we acquired earlier in the year has grown plenty of good-sized tomatoes, but they haven't ripened - Ruth thinks it might have been a variety that's supposed to be grown under glass. Picked the larger ones yesterday and looked for a recipe for green tomato chutney - I'm not hugely into chutney but remember making it from green tomatoes once before and it being quite nice.

Couldn't locate the recipe I used last time, so used this Nigel Slater one which mixes in some regular ripe tomatoes with the green ones. Not too sure about some of the ingredients (raisins?) and, contra Slater's assurances that it should only make a couple of jam jars' worth, I found it filled five jars - though admittedly there was quite a lot of liquid; perhaps I should have drained some of it off. Not too hopeful that the end product's going to be a treat, but you never know.