Autumn is the season when all the hard work in the vegetable plot pays off and you can start to feel really primal collecting your own food that you have grown and preparing meals with it or preserving it for later. 

Here I have piccalilli to have with the cold turkey at Christmas and some vegetable and fruit chutney that will be prefect for making barbecue sauce throughout the year. Yes it has sugar in it, but you eat so little of it so infrequently that its not going to be a problem.

 
But preserving takes planning and preparation and Autumn sometimes doesn’t allow time for that, it simply presents you with food and you quickly have to decide how to eat it before it passes its best, drops off the tree, goes rotten or gets eaten by something else! If you always have a container of stock (broth) in the fridge, you will always be able to do something! Say you have a glut of sweet corn and you can’t face another corn on the cob? 

If you have a good chicken stock in the fridge you can easily make a lovely smoked haddock and sweet corn chowder. This isn’t a classic chowder as I omitted the potato. The green is the herb chervil.

Suppose you have some beautiful herbs that are just ready to use?

If you have a good lamb stock in the fridge you can simply collect up any vegetables that are ready to eat and make a delicious lamb stew! Here with shallots, turnip, white beetroot, borlotti beans and tomatoes. The jellied stock was made from the bone of a roast joint of lamb.

However, its not always possible to be spontaneous I find. Sometimes, simply because of what they are, some things require a bit of planning to use them… enjoy your Autumn 🙂