Saturday 18 October 2008

Harvest home

In between playing in the park and having various stress attacks of the insurance induced nature we have started to decorate the house for harvest. Drying unappetising crab apples and stringing leaves. Still more to do but it will keep for a rainy day - I'm sure it won't be long till we have one!













4 comments:

Anonymous said...

sorry about the stressy stuff, but the harvest decorations look fantastic. Silly question but how do you dry apples, do you need to do anything special to them?

Claire said...

Well, this is the first time we have dried apples so I'm not sure if we've done it right in the sense that they might be rancid next week :-)

We sliced them then soaked them for a minute or so in water with a fizzy vitamin C tablet in. I read online that you must coat them in an ascorbic acid solution but everytime I ask our chemist for this he refuses to sell it - apparently it's used by heroin addicts!!??!! Anyway, the vitamin C tablets are mainly ascorbic acid so that should be fine. We then blotted off the excess and dried them on baking paper over the fireguard. We could have put them along the radiators or in the airing cupboard too. It took about twelve hours. They haven't gone hard, more rubbery - which is nice because you can thread them.

Claire said...

Forgot to say we have just done them for decoration. I think you are supposed to boil them if you are doing them to store and eat. I'd check up on it if that's what you were planning.

Anonymous said...

Oh wow, your house is going to look amazing