More Apple Jellies

Back to the long-neglected blog! 

As Autumn turns cold and soggy, I only have to look at my now-full preserves shelf to feel cheered. 

This has been an incredible year for all kinds of fruit.  Our Bramley tree which last year produced a grand total of 3 apples, has this year excelled itself and we have had more than we know what to do with.  Of course we've made great efforts to use what we can in cakes, puddings and chutneys, and I've enjoyed experimenting with a couple of new jams and jellies, as well as the 'usuals' (apple chilli, apple rosemary, and apple mint, instructions for which can be found earlier in this blog).

First off, Spiced Apple Butter.  Apple Butter is a very North American treat, although I don't think I ever actually ate it when I lived in Canada.  Slightly confusingly, it contains no actual butter, but is a long-cooked apple puree, often with spices such as cinnamon added.  I decided to try a recipe that used my rather neglected slow-cooker, and the results were delicious, making the entire house smell like Christmas! 

 I've put it all into sterilised jars ready to use in some festive baking.  I have of course sampled some already and it's great on toast.

The recipe can be found here, on the Frugal Foodie Mama website.

Next was Apple Quince Jelly.  I adore quinces, with their heady, almost floral scent, but they seem very difficult to come by in the shops.  This year I was lucky and managed to pick up a few windfalls locally. 

The flavour is intense so you actually don't need many to produce a beautiful preserve, bulked up of course with some apples!  Just look at this gorgeous colour, and it tastes wonderful too.  It's currently my breakfast toast-topping of choice.

I found the recipe here, on this nice foodie blog.

Finally, Apple Sloe Jelly.  The hedgerows are laden with sloes this year.  I have never used them for anything, save for drinking my father's homemade Sloe Gin!  On the tree they are mean fruit, small, hard and lip-puckeringly sour, but I felt sure that there must be potential for using them in something other than liqueur. 

A quick google brought me to this recipe, on The Cottage Smallholder (which incidentally is a fabulous blog, bursting with useful recipes).  Like the Quince jelly, this is a luscious colour, dark ruby red and gloriously clear (never squeeze the jelly bag when you're straining the fruit, otherwise your jelly will be cloudy).  I had slightly too much of this to fit in the available jars, so I'm currently working my way through a bowl of it on my toast.  (I eat a lot of toast!).  It's also  popular with the youngest member of the household.  

 I turn my back for a second...

The recipe indicates that this is a good jelly to eat with meats, but personally I think it's a little too sweet for that.  There's a lot of sugar in there (and I used a little less than the 1.5lb per pint stipulated as I ran out of sugar), so the sourness of the sloes has disappeared in my batch.  This makes it perfect as a jam, but probably not so suitable for eating with your sausages.  If I were to make it again (and I will) I think I would use 1lb of sugar per pint of juice, as you do usually when making jellies.

So all in all a successful year of preserving.  Just in case I forget to blog it properly, I also experimented with a new chutney, one that includes tomatoes.  The recipe is here, on the BBC Good Food website.  I used red pepper instead of green, but otherwise the recipe was unchanged by me.  It's still maturing in jars so I have yet to taste it, but I'm looking forward to it!

Happy Apple Day!

I wasn't intending to blog today.  I still have an unfinished post awaiting completion so I didn't think I'd be writing a new one...  but when I found out that yesterday was officially Apple Day I thought that I needed to mark it in some way! 

This might not look like a particularly happy apple, but believe me I was happy when I found it; and the many others that were sitting in a box on a driveway with a plaintive 'Please help yourself' sign. 

I was even happier to put them to use in the kitchen, and today I have made the most of the first day of the half term holiday and used up all the apples that I have collected from the driveways of Buckinghamshire. 

My favourite thing to make is Apple Chilli Jelly.  It's SO easy, the apples don't even need to be peeled and cored!  The recipe I use can be found here, but please note that a chopped red chilli should be added to the apples as they are first boiled (this is mentioned in the comments section below the recipe, but not in the recipe itself).  I made a batch of this last year and we have really enjoyed eating it since then.  I like it with roast chicken, but it's particularly nice with a plain milky white cheese such as Lancashire, Cheshire or Wensleydale.  The pulp is currently suspended in a muslin bag over a bowl as the juice drips out.  I will make it into beautiful red-flecked jelly tomorrow.

Whilst that was underway I set to making my first batch of chutney.  The recipe is from a much-used, well-battered charity cookbook sold in aid of the Alphington Church (in Exeter, Devon) repair fund.  It's one of those lovely fundraising books which is clearly a product of a whole community.  I have several such recipe books as I can never resist buying them.  In this case, several celebrities had clearly been asked to contribute recipes, and this Apple Chutney recipe is credited to the actress Penelope Keith - who starred, appropriately, in the classic 1970s comedy about self-sufficiency The Good Life!  Chutney-making Penelope is clearly a world away from her snobbish character Margot though - this recipe is a winner.  So simple, and a perfect way of using up a glut of windfall apples.  Although peeling, coring and dicing 4lb of them is not much fun...

I had my annual oh-no-the-pan-isn't-big-enough panic as I piled in the ingredients, but after a short time the apples had cooked down and begun to turn pulpy.

3 and a half hours of simmering later and I was able to pot 8 jars of chutney, enough to see us through about 6 months of cheese-and-chutney sandwiches!  Last year I made 2 batches of this and we finished them over the summer.  I think I'll need to collect more apples soon and make another few jars.  It keeps so well.

It's also a great way of reusing all those jars which I can't stop myself saving...  I use the nicer ones for sweet  jams and jellies, but those with the lingering scent of something savoury - olives, capers, curry paste (?!) - I save for chutney figuring that it has such a strong vinegary flavour that it will cover up any other tastes.

The recipe is nothing new, nothing special, but if you want a really good 'basic' chutney then you can't go wrong with it:

Penelope Keith's Apple Chutney

4lb windfall apples, peeled, cored and roughly diced
1lb onions, chopped
1lb sultanas
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 pint malt vinegar
1lb soft brown sugar
1tsp ground ginger
1tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground pepper

Put all ingredients into a pan.  Bring to the boil and simmer for 3-4 hours until dark brown.  (My note - from experience... Keep an eye on it for the last hour as it can stick and burn if left for too long at this point).  Pot whilst hot, in sterilised jars.

I hope you are enjoying apple season.  Excuse me while I clamber onto my soapbox, but I really really really resent the amount of apples that we import into this country.  Apples grow so well in England, and in such an abundance of varieties, that it seems so wrong to buy a bag of them that have been flown half way around the world.  I rarely buy apples in fact (as they are so easily available for free!), but whenever I do I carefully check the labels (so often designed it seems so that it's virtually impossible to find the country of origin...) and make sure that they are grown in the UK.  I've heard it called a mange-tout moment; you know, when you stand there in the produce section of a supermarket and realise that the small plastic-wrapped packet of veg you are about to throw into your trolley has actually come on a 10-hour flight from Kenya...  Well, have an 'apple moment' too!  Yes, I buy imported food - I'd find it hard to cook without such things as lemons that we can't grow in this country - but where there's a choice...  well, just think about it.