Berry and apple jam

A few years ago if you’d asked me what my favourite bought jam was I would have answered “some type of berry jam”.  Until this year I had only ever made one batch of berry jam.  We eat all sorts of other yummy scrumptious jams and marmalades. All home-made jams  are just so tasty that I have had no specific need for berry jams.  But this year we have blackberries in our driveway and hanging over a fence down the road and my local fruit shop keeps having amazing specials on strawberries.

I looked up my jam making books for a recipe and they all warned about the low pectin content of berries.  They all suggested adding pectin, using the special sugar for jams that contains pectin or accepting a runny jam.  None of these seemed acceptable to me.  I want a jam that’s only composed of fruit and sugar and I want it thick and chunky.  So I’ve been experimenting with adding apple to my berry jam mix.  I’ve worked out the right proportions now so that the apple doesn’t reduce the lovely rich berry flavour but I have a nice chunky properly set jam.  It’s more a guideline than a recipe but I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.  So far I’ve made strawberry, blackberry and mixed strawberry/blackberry. I’m pretty sure it would work with other berries too.  They taste divine and berry jams are now on my annual must-make list.

Berry and apple jam

Wash and prepare your berries.  I chop strawberries into the approximate size chunks I want in my finished jam – mostly this is quartered.

Weigh the berries

For every 500 g of prepared berries (or part thereof), you need one medium apple and the juice of half a lemon.

Grate your apple and weigh how much you have.

Make a note of your total fruit weight (prepared berries and apple) because you will need to add the same weight of sugar (e.g. 900 g of prepared berries plus apples, then you need 900 g of sugar).

Add grated apples and lemon juice to a large saucepan that looks like it can hold at least double the volume of your total fruit.  Add a splash or two of water and simmer until the apples are soft and mushy.   This normally takes me about ten minutes but will depend a bit on how much apple you have and the apple variety. Add a little more water if you need it. I normally leave the lid on for cooking the apples.

Add your berries and mix into the apples. The lid should be off now unless you want it on for a minute or two to help bring your fruit back to the boil.  I don’t cook my berries for long here because I like chunky jam, if you’d prefer a smoother jam then cook until your chunks of fruit are so soft they fall apart.  I normally cook them at a low boil for about 5 minutes for the blackberries and 10 minutes for the strawberries.  When I made the mixed jam I added the strawberries first, simmered for 5 minutes and then added the blackberries for the final 5 minutes. Raspberries, boysenberries etc are likely to only need 5 minutes whereas blueberries might need closer to 10 minutes. If you have large quantities of fruit (e.g. more than about 1.5 kg) it might take longer.

Add your sugar and stir until it dissolves. Lightly boil your jam until it reaches setting point (see notes below on how to determine this).

Turn off the heat, place the lid on your pan and let it cool for ten minutes.  This cooling helps to ensure even distribution of fruit chunks throughout your final jam.  You can skip this step if you’ve cooked everything until its mushy or you don’t care if all your chunks fall to the bottom of the jar as the jam is setting.  Don’t leave longer than ten minutes or the jam may cool too much and your jam may spoil in the jar during storage.

Pour/spoon the jam into sterilised jars and seal.

Enjoy on fresh buttered bread. Yum!

Notes:

** I sterilise my clean jars by placing them in the oven when I start the jam process, I turn the oven on to 100 °C and make sure they have at least ten minutes at the fully heated temperature.  I sterilise the clean jar lids by placing them in a big bowl and pouring boiling water over them to generously cover all the lids.  Make sure there are no air bubbles because the entire surface of the lid needs to be in contact with the water. I leave them for 10 minutes before picking them out with sterilised tongs  and leaving them to dry face side down on a very clean tea towel.  Other people boil their lids for 10 minutes.  I sterilise all spoons, tongs etc by pouring boiling water over them

** Determining setting point.  I place a saucer in the freezer when I start making jam.  Once the sugar is in I place a dollop of jam on this saucer every five minutes or so and return it to the freezer for a few minutes. I then push my index finger through the slightly cooled jam.  If the jam wrinkles and puckers and generally shows setting tendencies then I know I’ve reached setting point.  If you haven’t made jam before it does take a few goes to get a feel for it.  You can go over setting point you’ll just have a very thick jam and if you go too far it might caramelise the sugars.  But it’s still edible.

This summer in my kitchen…

Pear and apple google indulgence

Please indulge me for this post.  I’m slightly in shock, good shock though.  So good that I’m about to toot my own horn, because I can’t think who’d appreciate this more than my lovely readers. I hope you don’t mind.

So I get quite a few people finding my blog because they google  some version of “pear and apple jam” and they find my post on, what else, but  making pear and apple jam.  A great big hand wave and “hi” to you if your search for this jam is what led you to my blog.

A couple of days ago in a little bout of curiosity I decided to google both “pear and apple jam” and “apple and pear jam”.  Just, you know, to see where I was positioned.  Maybe someone where on the fourth page.

And this is where the shock part comes in because I wasn’t on the fourth page or the third or the second.  I was on the first page.  And it gets even better, because when I googled both “pear and apply jam” and “apple and pear jam” I came up as the very first search result!

How…cool….is…that?

You guys put me there!  I am so wonderfully amazingly stoked!  My little blog has the most popular pear and apple jam recipe in the world.

So I told Mr Bee.  He got really excited for me and then he put a little downer on it.  Apparently Google does this smart stuff that works out where you are in the world and what sort of searches you do and reorders your search results a bit to make them special to you.  So maybe I only come up first because  I’m searching about myself?  But no, my pear and apple jam post came up first when Mr Bee googled too.

So here’s where the real indulgence comes in.  What if you, dear reader, google either “pear and apple jam” or “apple and pear jam” (don’t include the quotes, I just put them in so you could easily see the search term)? Where does the Tales from a Well Stocked Larder  recipe post come on your search result order?  I would love to know.

 

New organic magazine find

In the peacefulness of the week between Christmas and New Year I took myself off to my local library.  I was looking for light reading, you know, books to flick through, magazines, nothing to strenuous, maybe a light novel at the most intense.  As it happened the  library only had issues I’d already read of my usual magazine reads (Organic Gardener, Gardening Australia  and Interweave Knits) so I went browsing for something new and discovered Organic Gardening.  It’s American, so has been a bit off my radar.

It’s quite different to the Australian Organic Gardener.  Organic Gardener concentrates very directly on growing fruit and veg organically (with a little on ornamentals) and on related environmental issues (e.g. the environmental impacts of pesticides or climate change).  Organic Gardening seems to focus broadly on organic gardening with ornamentals included more.  It has a bigger emphasis on profiles of  people and their gardens (and a sneak peek into their lives).  And does interviews with chefs who have complementary principles involved in their cooking (I’ve copied down a couple of recipes).  I found Organic Gardening less hard-core organic than Organic Gardener, but just as enjoyable and have now added it into my regular library borrowing rotation.

Through the fence posts: wishing I had their vegie garden

I’ve walked this street so many times and never noticed the house with the front garden full of vegies and little fruit trees.  I normally walk on the other side of the road and the garden was hidden a little bit by street trees. When we came across it I made Mr Bee stop, I took the photos, imbibed the general vegie garden atmosphere and only left when Mr Bee decided we were hanging around outside the people’s front garden for just a bit longer than is polite.

Don’t you just love all these vegies and the little fruit trees?

Beats lawn any day.

Chicken confessions

I became a vegetarian at the ripe old age of eight.  Or should I say I became an ethical vegetarian then because, though my mother was very understanding, trying to provide a meat and meatless meal each night for her family was a bit much.  And an eight year old who can get that eating meat means killing animals can also get that it’s unfair to make your mother cook two meals every night.  So we settled on that Mum would cook vego a couple of nights a week, that I would eat meals with mince beef and chicken breasts, and that on other nights I would have an omellete.  I could handle the mince OK, I mean it’s so ground up it doesn’t really seem like meat, but the chicken breasts, oh the chicken breasts.  I forced them down week after week, year after year.  I smothered the chicken breast in sour cream, various sauces, mashed potato, whatever I could find and I gulped and gulped.

Now, many years later, I am no longer a practising or ethical vegetarian.  I have reconciled within myself that eating meat means killing animals.  Now I focus much more on eating meat where the animals had a good life and where hopefully their death was not too painful or prolonged.  But I have not been able to bring myself to eat chicken, even free range organic chicken. The thought of it takes me back to my childhood and my voluntarily force eating of it.

Then in early January I was thinking where I wanted to go food wise in 2012.  As you already know we don’t have access to as big a vegie garden this year so my thoughts drifted towards meat.  At the moment we eat mainly beef, fish and a bit of cured pork (like bacon, prosciutto).  I thought about how, one day, I plan to have chickens for eggs.  But if you have chickens for eggs, what do you do with the extra chickens?  I decided that I wanted to get over my “urgh” with eating chicken so that once we kept chickens I’d be able to eat them as well as their eggs.

Enter my size 19 free range organic chicken.  Purchased at my local farmer’s market.  It was a whopper, all the small sizes had been bought by people who were in the know: go to the chicken farmer first not last.  So I had an almost 2 kg bird and only two people to eat it.  I was going to overcome my chicken urghness with a bang.

The first night we had a roast, with the works.  We ate the drumsticks and wings.  I didn’t dry reach.  The chicken fat roasted potatoes were lovely.  The chicken, well even a free range organic chicken is pretty tasteless.  I don’t think I’m what you’d call a convert.

(Sorry, no pictures of the roast I was too concerned with the fact that I was actually eating chicken and not finding it too bad)

The second night I wanted to try something else so I striped the carcass and made a pie and man what a pie it was.  Mr Bee proclaimed it the “best chicken pie ever”.  If I eat chicken in future it’s going in a pie.  I have included the recipe at the end of this post.

And then, because I am an ethical meat-eater and I didn’t want to waste any of the bird, I made stock.  It’s now sitting in my freezer waiting for winter and some yummy soups.

So overall, the chicken, I’d call it a success. I decided that while I can eat chicken, I don’t think I’ll ever chose to eat chicken.  But once we have chickens at home I’ll be able to eat them as well as their eggs.

Chicken Pie

• Dash of olive oil and small knob of butter
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 2 celery sticks, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• left over cooked chicken, cut into edible size chunks
• 60 g plain flour
• 80 mL white wine
• 125 mL cream
• 250 mL water
• Dash of oyster sauce
• ½ tsp dried sage
• Your favorite savory short crust pastry, rolled out to fit the base of a pie dish and  also as a lid for your pie
• 1 egg yolk

1. Preheat oven to 180 °C (360 F)
2. Add oil and butter to a fry pan and sauté onion until soft
3. Add carrot, celery and garlic and sauté for a few minute
4. Coat chicken in flour (I find this is the easiest way to add the flour and not have it go lumpy) and add to vegetables, sauté for a minute or two.
5. Add wine and let it simmer until reduced by approximately half
6. Add cream, water, oyster sauce and sage, simmer for approximately 5 minutes
7. Turn off heat and let cool a bit while you prepare pastry in pie dish
8. Add filling (it will pile high).  Wash edges of pastry with egg and place pastry lid on top.  Crimp pastry edges with a fork to join top and bottom pieces.  Brush top of pie with egg.  Use fork to place some air holes in the pastry top
9. Bake in oven for about 30 minutes or until the crust is golden
10. Enjoy!

Simple pleasures in a tea cup

One small bunch of lemon balm  from the garden,  a mug, boiling water.

Lemon…yes, but also a slight sense of heat like in ginger.