Earlier this week (amid the chaos of the small fry starting at their new - 5 second commute - primary school) I opted to channel my frustrations at being cooped up inside in this glorious weather (thanks to my delightful photosensitive reaction courtesy of the Lyme's disease medication...) by making a start on the preserving marathon.
In the past, in the old garden, I always enjoyed a spot of jam making, though it was mainly the hugely prolific blackcurrant bush that provided my bounty, handy considering that Blackcurrant Jam is my absolute favourite! Sadly the blackcurrant bush here is not so bountiful - perhaps it may improve once a little of its enthusiastic redcurrant bush overload competition has been reduced, but just in case it doesn't, my lovely smallholding friend Sue has given me a rooted sucker from her ridiculously fruitful blackcurrant bush, all nicely potted up and ready to plant this Autumn - what an angel.
Of course I also made marmalade in January, but somehow, because you purchase the ingrediants and plan carefully for its transformation, it doesn't seem like quite such a 'war against waste' that the current situation does...for at the moment, I am feeling marginally overwhelmed by the fruit that is literally throwing itself at me from this garden!
The Blaisdon culinary plums have been flinging themselves off the tree for 2 weeks now (early), the smallest pear tree (which grandma has recently revealed to be a Williams pear) has just overnight become ready to harvest, so I had to do it quick as the jackdaws were already starting to nab a few (early again), the big cooker apple which is our swing tree is throwing windfalls about with gay abandon, making up for the sorry showing of the 'young' cooker which seemed to have suffered serious aphid damage in the late spring/early summer shortly before the young fruits were battered by the freak Glastonbury Festival hailstorm. Of course we are also picking blackberries like crazy from the hedgerows and I also recently was invited to help myself to as many damsons as I liked from kind Sue's marvelous hedge's around her orchard.
Add to all this the mountains of raspberries, redcurrants and gooseberries in the freezer which is now becoming a little pressured since the demise 2 weekends ago of my ageing fridge freezer, until the new freezer arrives and you can surely sense my mounting preserving panic!!!
So I started by freeing up a bit of freezer space by making raspberry jam last Sunday, lovely, but took an age to reach a set - I wondered if this might be to do with the fruit having been frozen? Defrosted fruit somehow always seems to have a higher water content, but even using jam sugar I had to test 5 times and boil probably for an extra 15 minutes. The ultimate result of this of course was more evaporation and less jam in the end - only 5 jars when it should have made at least 6.
Next on the hit list was the plums, or half of them at least. Now I find plum jam very sweet - too sickly sweet really - so I had a brainwave and decided to do half and half Blaisdon plum and wild damson jam! A triumph, the damsons certainly gave a depth and sharpness while the sweetness of the Blaisdons meant that I didn't need to add so much sugar as you normally do for damson jam.
I was contemplating moving on to start processing the apples into batches of apple sauce to freeze (and I might trial bottled apple sauce this year too, to see if it keeps well), when grandma kindly pointed out the rapidly ripening figs...most of which are too high to reach and the birds and wasps usually get there first...but we managed this wee haul:
Now I'm not one for fig jam, I love them baked with honey and served with greek yogurt, but as I seem to be the only one who will eat them, this looked a little too much for my digestive system to deal with!
So I opted for a foray into Nigella and found this recipe for figs preserved in rum, which sounded up my street, especially as the recommendation is to let them 'brew' for 4 months at least, taking us nicely up to Christmas and therefore present giving potential!
So here are the finished bottles (alongside my jars of Plum and Damson Jam awaiting labelling). I was amazed at how they shrunk down - 2.5kg of large figs fitted, with rum syrup, into 3 800ml bottles. Nigella's recipe had 1 kg of figs filling a 1 litre jar, however she used whole small black figs, whereas I had no choice but to cut mine into halves and quarters or they wouldn't have fit into my jars! So I presume they lost a fair bit of volume by evaporation during the 1.5 hours cooking time. The proof of whether my experiment has worked will be awaited in December...
Tomorrow hopefully I will have the energy to turn my attention towards making a start on the apple puree and probably bottling the remainder of the Williams pears before they over-ripen.
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