Storing fruit and vegetables

Our own fruit and vegetable production is still on the back burner for the time being. We planted a number of fruit trees last September, but they are obviously still too young to bear fruit this year, and we didn’t have enough time for the vegetable garden this spring. Our own cherry tree is doing well, and in the autumn we will once again have an abundance of walnuts. But our neighbours have several mature fruit trees and no time or inclination to do anything with them. So there are literally kilos of fruit up for grabs.

Enough to get started with. Vegetables preserved in vinegar, vegetables and fruit pickled, jam, sun-dried fruit, etc. We are trying all kinds of preservation methods. It probably won’t all work out equally well, but we can learn from our mistakes.

There’s one thing we haven’t done yet, but will undoubtedly do in the coming years: distilling our own fruit pálinka, one of Hungary’s specialities, which doesn’t seem too difficult. For now, we can only taste pálinka that we’ve bought.