Sorry… they tasted disgusting!

In my efforts not to waste anything, especially food I try and preserve what we have which is excess to our needs… so into the freezer goes lots of lovely home-grown fruit and vegetables, on with the preserving pan to make jams and pickles and chutneys (even though we don’t eat a great deal and end up giving it all away!) and this year I bought a dehydrator to preserve things in a different way. All these schemes of mine have been fairly successful… but I have had one disaster.

With a glut of runner beans I decided to try salting them as it suggested in a book I have on preserving and storing. I followed the instructions so carefully, topping and tailing, slicing and blanching… I put down a layer of salt and carefully put them to bed, pressing down more salt between the rows so there were no air bubbles. It took me ages, ages and ages… the container was sealed… and I waited…

I don’t think I can bring myself to describe what I found when I took off the lid… There was no doubt that it had to be thrown away, no doubt at all, but in the interests of research I did rinse and taste a little bean… Oh how I wished I hadn’t…

This is one method of preserving I will not try again! I’m not sure what went wrong, but even if it had gone right I don’t think the results would have been edible, not to our twenty-first century tastes, anyway!

I’ve used a nice picture as my featured photo… to take my mind off what I found when I opened the lid of the container!