Autumn at Home 🧺🍂 | Seasonal Cooking, Pumpkin Harvest & Slow Countryside Living

Hello and welcome back. Today's video is going to be a kind of pantry, stocking up for autumn, reset, replenish, organise. It's going to be a bit of everything. We're starting off with a big old food delivery. I have done one of these in videos before and I mentioned that I do them, well we normally do them about once or twice a year so every kind of six months we just order a load of food and the reason why we do it with these guys is a lot of it is organic food, we're quite conscious with that sort of thing so I thought I would take you through it because I don't know about you but I find it really interesting what people buy in the food shops. I know quite a few other people do as well so I thought we'd do this and then we will kind of decant everything, get everything organised in the pantry and then what I'm thinking is I have so many pieces of squash, like squash as in, hang on let me show you, butternut squash, that's the word I'm looking for, butternut squash from the allotment that we have harvested over the past couple of weeks and we need to do something with it so what I'm thinking is batch making a load of butternut squash soup and storing that up for the coming autumn and winter months. So that's the plan for today's video, I hope you're looking forward to it. Let's get into, it's not really a food shop, I suppose it's a food order, let's call it that. So we did get quite a lot of coconut cream, we love a Thai green curry and stuff like that so we've got lots of coconut cream and then on the topic of coconut, lots of organic extra virgin coconut oil, I wanted to say olive oil then, coconut oil. We got quite a few of these because the pets eat it, so Ember absolutely loves it, it's really really good for their coat, it's a lot of, you know, good fats for them and we obviously use a separate jar but we would use that for, like I use it for moisturiser and for hair oil, I use it for all sorts of kind of beauty things because it's just, you know, there's no chemicals in it or anything like that, it's just pure coconut oil. So I use it for a lot of sort of health and beauty things, obviously you can use it in cooking as well but I mainly use it, as I said, moisturiser, hair stuff, it's great, if you haven't tried it, I definitely recommend it and if you want me to do a video where I kind of go into more of this sort of thing about hair and beauty and natural ways of doing things then yeah, let me know in the comments. Anyway, next up we've got a lot of orzo pasta, I love putting orzo pasta in lots of stews in the winter time, lots of broths, all of that sort of thing. Then we've got some cranberries infused with apple, I thought that would be nice for around Christmas time so we'll put those away for a couple of months. We've got some milk chocolate, Belgian milk chocolate buttons, if like me you're a bit of a sweet tooth chocolate fiend then these, these are like the best chocolate I've ever had, they are so good. I'm still upset at the fact that Cadbury had changed their chocolate recipe but these are, these are really really good. We've got some mango pieces for snacking, we've got some whole grain pasta that's macaroni shaped, again I thought this would be lovely for the autumn winter time, making some nice macaroni cheese. I did actually do a recipe a couple of years ago for pumpkin macaroni cheese which I thought maybe we could do in October time using the pumpkins that I've got growing at the allotment so that would be really exciting. Got some vitamin b12 and some organic hand sanitiser, I think this is just essential oils, yeah tea tree oil. I got a load of pitted dates because I am really enjoying dates with peanut butter and dark chocolate and you know, I'm sure you've all seen it online, if not let me know, again I will share the recipe. You kind of make this sort of date bark and it's really really yummy. In order to kind of replace the chocolate with something sweet but a little bit healthier I have bought the dates instead in what will probably be a attempt to reduce my chocolate consumption. We've got a load of baked beans, we've got some short grain brown rice and some bulgur wheat and then lastly we've got a few packs of organic canned tomatoes which are always essential for things like pastas. Anyway without further ado I think what we'll do is we'll put these away now. Oh hello, hello, okay thank you, thank you so much. We'll put these away now into the pantry and yeah just have a really good sort out. So as you can see we do have quite a lot going on in this pantry but this sort of thing has been built up over years and years of just slowly accumulating all of the jars, all of the food and the appliances so please don't think that this is something that we managed to do overnight. This is years worth of accumulation and it works really well for us. I am a very visual person so when it comes to food if it's not right in front of me, if I can't visually see the ingredients I will just forget about it, it's just the way my brain works. We've obviously had kitchens before where you put food into the kitchen cupboards but for me having a pantry with everything out and accessible has become incredible. It's really changed the way that I cook and I use a lot more ingredients and I try out a lot of different ingredients that perhaps I haven't used before and I know that this is not something everybody has, it's quite a niche thing I suppose in older houses but I do absolutely love having this pantry, it's one of my favourite things. It's amazing how quickly the allotment changes at this point in the year. A few weeks ago everything was completely overflowing and everything was beautiful and green and now I'm harvesting my pumpkins which is normally kind of the last things that you traditionally harvest and as you can see they are definitely ready to be harvested, the vines are absolutely finished, they are completely spent. I only managed four pumpkins this year, I definitely imagine myself carrying home more than four but four is better than nothing which is what I would have had if I hadn't had planted these seedlings so I am very grateful for what we have. I think next year I'd love to dedicate a much bigger area to pumpkins and try to grow loads of different varieties because there's just something so joyous about them, I really really enjoy growing them for some reason. There's still a few pockets of summer hanging around in the polytunnel, particularly the kale and the tomatoes and cucumbers. It's kind of strange harvesting tomatoes at the same time as pumpkins because it feels like the two seasons are definitely overlapping now I suppose but soon most of this will be cleared away in the polytunnel too and the beds will be put to rest. I need to put out some fresh compost and make sure there's a lot of nutrition in there ready for the season next year so that will definitely be coming in a video very very soon if you're interested so make sure you're subscribed for that. And although it kind of makes me feel a bit sad to be honest, there's something quite comforting in knowing that nothing in nature is constantly switched on, it's not supposed to be productive 24-7 throughout the year. So this is all of the squash, well actually it's not all of it because we have already eaten quite a few, but this is what remains of everything that we harvested from the allotment this year. There's quite a lot here and I have recently discovered rather conveniently a real love for it, it's so so tasty, I really really like it. I've basically just been chopping it into chunks and roasting it, it's really good if you want to have it alongside a roast dinner with your roast potatoes and your chicken or whatever but what I want to do today is basically try to make a sort of multi-purpose butternut squash soup slash kind of pasta sauce and I'm going to store it in jars but essentially what I'm going to do is chop it up, roast it with some garlic, salt, pepper, onions, all that sort of thing and then once it's all roasted and golden and then all you do is just blitz it. So I will probably blitz it with some stock, I've got some organic bone broth or you could use maybe some cream or milk if you wanted to make it really you know thick and creamy and soupy. That would obviously make it rather calorific but I might do a few different versions for different things and then for the rest of them I'm just going to chop them up and pop them in some freezer bags and store them in the freezer so that as and when I need like a bag of them for a roast dinner or a meal, I've really got them pre-prepped. So let's get on to making soup or sauce now. So it's the next day and after I chopped up and roasted all of the squash with garlic and onions and a little bit of chilli, it was all ready to be blitzed together into the soup. So I'm just getting everything into the pan now and I'm also putting in some organic chicken stock and some organic chicken bone broth as well and just giving it all a really good blitz with this sort of handheld, I mean it's not a mixer but I'm gonna call it a mixer because I can't think what it is off the top of my head. And yes it is very messy so I promptly put on an apron over my white top because that was just a disaster waiting to happen. This is such an easy uncomplicated method of making soup. As I said I also love to just have this on hand to throw in as a healthy pasta sauce or maybe with some ravioli or something like that. It's just one of those things that's so nice to have on hand to just make a quick meal when you've gotten from work and you're starving and you really can't be bothered to do any serious cooking. So I just tend to keep it quite simple as I said just a little bit of salt and pepper, some herbs and then the garlic and onion and spices, whatever I'm in the mood for really. Once it has all been blitzed up I'm decanting it into these kilner jars. I would like to can them like as in cook them properly but we do not have a proper pressure cooker where these jars will actually fit into it. Our pressure cooker is much too small so I'm making sure I'm leaving a really good gap and I'm going to pop these in the freezer. These are freezer safe jars so they are fine to do that and if you're doing something similar do just make sure that the jars are freezer safe and that you leave a gap in the jars because obviously this soup is going to expand as it freezes. And then I'm just making sure everything is labelled, obviously putting the date of when I made it as well so that I know when it needs to be eaten by and the little orange stuff on the top is basically chili olive oil which again just helps to create a sort of seal I suppose if you will over the soup to just help preserve it that little bit longer. But I'm super pleased with these and my goodness it is so tasty with some bread, really 10 out of 10 lunch. I've walked through these woods so many times before but I don't think I've actually ever been around this time of the year, the time when it is very late summer slash very early autumn now because we have had the equinox. We're in that kind of strange space where autumn hasn't fully arrived, most of the trees are still green and the woods don't have those deep autumnal colours yet which we know are just around the corner but there are still tiny signs everywhere that things are on the cusp of changing I think. There are berries appearing all over the hedgerows, I am seeing squirrels absolutely everywhere scurrying around and burying their nuts for the winter time and the woodland suddenly feels so much busier with all the animals preparing for the months ahead. But I think the sunlight is actually something I notice changing the most at this time of year, the sun definitely seems a lot lower, the light is a lot more golden and even in the middle of the day you do seem to get these lovely long shadows stretching through the trees. I think this is one of my favourite parts of the changing seasons, not necessarily the dramatic gold and oranges but that sort of suspense, the moment before we know that there is a big change coming and then one day you look around and realise that the season has completely changed. I hope that you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to like and subscribe to my channel and I'll see you here next Sunday at five o'clock. Stay happy and blessed be.