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!

Stolen Treasures

If a tree laden with fruit is growing in someone's garden, but the fruit is hanging over a public footpath, then is it stealing if you pick it?  This was the question that flitted through my mind as I hurriedly filled my empty sandwich box with luscious sweet Mirabelle plums on a local walk a few weeks ago.

I had done a cursory check into said garden, and established that no one was home, and salved my conscience by telling myself that there were literally thousands of plums on this tree...  but I couldn't help but feel a little guilty about taking them.

However, once home I put all guilt aside and set to turning these golden beauties into jam. 

Mirabelles are a small variety of plum - the perfect size for stoning with a cherry-pitter, and much less messy to do so!  They were perfectly ripe so were stoned with ease, and were soon bubbling away with some sugar and water. 

The recipe I used - this one, from the fabulous River Cottage 'Preserves' handbook by Pam Corbin - instructed one to crack some of the plum stones to extract the kernels and give the jam a slight almondy flavour.  But this sounded dangerous (I had visions of trying to bash them open with a hammer...) so instead, just as setting point was reached I added a scant teaspoon of almond essence.  This has provided a wonderful addition to the fruitiness of the jam - the almond flavour is subtle, but adds a real depth to the preserve. 

As you can see, I upped the almond level in one of my three jars by stirring through a generous handful of slivered almonds, which should provide an interesting texture.  I had never added nuts to a jam, but I have my fingers crossed that it will be a successful experiment.

A quick check through my kitchen cupboard has revealed that I now have 5 different varieties of home-made jam, all made in recent months.  With blackberries still to come, I fear that there will be even more by the time 2009 ends.  We don't even eat that much jam...  I think we'll just have to make the clotted cream tea a weekly occurance!

Further Foraging...

I couldn't believe it... cherries, growing wild on trees a mere 2 minutes walk from home! So yesterday I carried a garden chair down to the canal, set it up in the middle of the towpath underneath a groaning bough of cherries and got picking. Much to the amusement of the passing joggers and dog-walkers, and the annoyance of a grey squirrel sitting on the aforementioned bough and filling his cheeks with the cherries.

Within about 20 minutes I had gathered this punnet full - about a kilogram of fruit - and I could have carried on but was in danger of over-stretching and falling off my garden chair into the canal. Which come to think of it would probably have provided much more amusement to the joggers and dog-walkers, and a certain amount of alarm to the ducks.

So bearing in mind the well-known proverb that Greed comes before a Fall I stopped and carried my punnet of cherries proudly home.



Only to think now what on earth do I do with these?!!



Obviously photographing them was a good start!

But today, one cherry-pitter purchased, and recipes researched, another batch of jam is on the way...

Pick Your Own

I have fond childhood memories of 'Pick Your Own' farms. I particularly remember Mum sending my brother and me to pick the strawberries because she had a bad back, so would rather pick fruit standing up. She would head off to pick raspberries while Ben and I would fill our punnets... and our faces... with strawberries! What child is going to complain about that?

So when I realised that there is a PYO farm nearby, I was quickly on the 'phone to find out what was ready for picking. It seems that it's still a little early for raspberries and currants, but I was delighted to hear that they had ripe strawberries and gooseberries, so we headed off for a picking session on Saturday.

Despite being fiendishly prickly, the gooseberries were easy to pick. They were plump and juicy, and the bushes were laden. I love their translucent, stubbly skins.



The strawberries of course necessitated scrabbling about close to the ground, but the reward of pulling back a handful of leaves to find these treasures made the aching back worthwhile.

And obviously there were other rewards too...!

Back at home, I was faced with the reality of nearly 3kg of soft fruit that needed using, and fast. A quick e.mail to Mum gave me the recipe for the Gooseberry and Cinnamon Flan that I remember as a result of those childhood visits to PYO farms, and I also turned some into a compote to accompany elderflower creams (like a very English pannacotta), the recipe for which I discovered in Nigella's How to Eat. (Once the elderflower season is past, these creams can easily be made using cordial, as Australian fellow-blogger Sarah discovered as she was heroically cooking her way through the entire book in a year!)

This still left me with 700g of gooseberries, so I made these into a gooseberry and elderflower jam. The recipe was very simple - equal amounts of fruit and sugar, cooked up with half the amount of water (ie 350ml of water for 700g of fruit and 700g of sugar). Instead of using water, I made up 350ml of elderflower cordial, with about 100ml of cordial and 250ml water. Gooseberries are very high in pectin, so this jam set beautifully. And I think it looks beautiful too, pinkish-orange, gooseberry seeds suspended within.



The strawberries too became jam - strawberry and rhubarb jam to be precise. I struggled to find a recipe for this, but ended up amalgamating several I had found online, one of which being a recent post on David Lebovitz's blog. I used equal weights of these fruits as I had so many strawberries. Both rhubarb and strawberry are low in pectin, so I used a cup of apple juice and the juice of a large lemon to encourage it to set. After much boiling it is still what I would describe as 'soft set' but by no means overly runny. However at one point I was beginning to wonder if I should have followed the advice found in several American versions of this recipe, and added 'Strawberry Jello' to the pan!






I think it must be time for a clotted cream tea...

Rhubarb

Afternoon Tea

When I'm feeling bit unsettled, when home doesn't quite yet feel like home, there's nothing more certain to comfort me than food. Not just any food will do - no chocolate-fest or demolition of an entire packet of custard creams for me - I need something that will give me that halo of domesticity. This weekend I also felt it was important to make something that would ground me in the traditions of England and induce a warming sense of nostalgia. A quite literally fruitful cycle ride last weekend saw us returning with a pound of ripe blackberries and a dozen windfall apples that were quickly turned into 4 pots of Bramble and Apple Jelly.





A trip to meet some foodie friends in London's Borough Market provided an opportunity to smap up a tub of real Clotted Cream... Can you guess where this post is going?!



There was nothing for it, a clotted cream tea just had to be made. As an added bonus, we were visited at teatime on Saturday by two good friends, so we pretended to ourselves that we were making the tea for them, but we were fooling no one. We would have made it just for us. And eaten 2 scones each.

Amazingly, this was I think my first attempt at making scones. I suppose that I may have done so during 'Home Economics' at school once, but as I can't remember it they can't have been too good. My husband has always made the scones in our house, using the recipe from Delia's Complete Cookery Course, but this time I wanted to try my luck. I used a recipe taken from a 2004 Waitrose magazine, and was seriously impressed with the lightness of the resulting scones, which also rose impressively. The recipe can also be found here.

Just the sight of clotted cream brings back so many memories for me. At the end of every childhood holiday in Devon, we would stop at the village shop to buy a tub of local clotted cream to take home. My memory fails me at this point, I'm not quite sure how we ate it once home, but whether it was melting atop some hot fruit crumble, or sitting proudly upon a scone, I know that I have always loved it. Just looking at it is enough to make me salivate - the buttery colour is spectacular, and I love the way that it is so thick that it's quite hard work to lick it off the spoon. (To reassure you, I waited until our friends had left before I tried!)

Somehow the well-worn debate about whether the cream or the jam should be first onto the scone took up little of our afternoon. This was no time for talk. There was the serious business of reacquainting ourselves with the culinary traditions of our native land to be getting on with.