Scrumping.

The gallon of cider we brought back from Somerset?

It's all gone, just a memory.

So I decided that as there are so many apple trees in the hedgerows (people throw apple cores out of their car windows and they grow) that we would pick some apples and make our own cider!

It was a really good plan but it didn't quite work out, as usual.

I had my eye on a tree heavy with apples, by a layby on a road near us. Unfortunately, when we got there someone else had had the same idea first - all the apples were gone!

Then we saw this pear tree - lets make Perry!

Luckily, there was an old apple picker in the shed and we took it in turns;

Now Robyn is a strict 'keep to the recipe' person while I don't mind being flexible (very flexible). We got as many pears as we could, and to my mind that was enough.

I then wasted about a day hunting around for my mum's old hand mincer untiI I came to the conclusion that she had thrown it out.

Shame.

So then I dragged out our old Kenwood mixer - it had been out in a damp conservatory for about 25 years and it has a mincer attachment;

It took a lot of cleaning up - at one point I found I'd covered out worktop with a horrible black sticky tar - it was the old rubber feet which had decayed.

I fixed up the mincer, checked that it worked and then we became a production line - chopping the pears and pushing them through the mincer.

Except that it started to smoke.

First just a wisp, then a plume.

No matter how long a break I gave it, every time I turned it on it smoked again.

In the end we had to give up on the mixer - all those childhood memories of cakes being mixed - gone now.

In the end, we found you could just shred the pears on a grater and the job was done quite easily.

 

 

Then all we had to do was squeeze the juice out without a press.

 

No problem.

 

I'll keep you posted.

 

Neil Harris

 

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

 

Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com