Putting the Bees to Bed

Today Dad and I went and visited all 11 of our hives. At the height of the summer we had 15. A couple were very weak splits and didn't make it or were united back. But luckily our current 11 all seem to be doing really well! I was so surprised by how big the populations still are and how much stores they have. Luckily October has been very mild so far. But today we went and put the girls to bed - I will miss them so much this winter! We fed them some sugar syrup and have just about closed them up. I'm sure we'll go and visit again soon but our summer jobs are over now and soon it will be too cold for them to even venture out. So onto the winter and building endless frames etc!

Last weekend we spent forever making up our own sugar syrup. It was meant to come out as fondant, and this required a very long and tiring process. When I went into the kitchen it smelled like Dad was making chutney, but it turns out he had added vinegar to the sugar mixture to "invert" the sugars. I haven't researched this yet but it's something to do with unlocking fructose from the sucrose or something. After that came a lot of heating it to an exact temperature, cooling it down to an exact temperature, and then whisking it until the electric mixer died! After that we put it in bottles ready to feed the bees. It isn't quite thick enough to be called fondant but it's so much thicker than simply boiling up sugar and some water!

After tasting my Grandpa's delicious tomatoes I harvested all ours, even the green ones. I put them in the airing cupboard to ripen - this must have been ages ago now - and forgot about them. Then when we were doing more de-cluttering yesterday we found all these ripe tomatoes in the cupboard! Unfortunately the Brandywines were a bit mushy but the Roma were divine...but even the mushy ones wills be great in my Mum's tomato sauce!

Mum's tomato sauce

Mum used to live in Italy. She's always telling us stories about her old landlady who hid Italian Jews in her attic during the war, strange past Italian boyfriends who had nose jobs, ridiculous superstitions about odd numbers of nuns...English people just don't seem to know how to cook Italian food, putting cream in their carbonara and god knows what in their tomato sauce. Don't do it! This sauce is only 5 ingredients and it really doesn't need anything else! Use it on pizza, with meatballs, on pasta, with chickpea croquettes...anything. Makes 1 quantity.

Ingredients:

1 x tin plum tomatoes (whole, not chopped)

glug of olive oil

pinch of salt

good grind of pepper

a clove of garlic, crushed

and you can add a couple of basil leaves or a pinch of dried oregano or marjoram if you like ^^

Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the garlic for a minute or two. Add the tomatoes. Break them up a bit with a spatula. Cook until it starts to thicken slightly, perhaps for about 20 minutes. It will smell wonderful. Add the seasonings if you want them. Savour.

Thanks everyone for all your comments recently! I'm really interested to hear what you all think about the plastics - maybe one of us will come up with a cunning plan and save the world! See you soon ^^