A farmers’ market cornucopia: preserving those tomatoes

I’ve finally made my way through most of my box of tomatoes.  Let me show you all the goodies I’ve made….

Tomato sauce/ketchup.  This stuff is to die for and the original reason why I snapped up the box, but about 6 kg of tomatoes later and we have enough ketchup (along with the other two bottle in storage and one in the fridge) to last us until next tomato season.  I used the recipe out of A Year in a Bottle but rather than pass it through a sieve I just whizz it until it’s a nice mixture of smooth with small chunky bits and then reboil it for ten minutes before storing in sterilised jars.  I promise you, after eating this stuff, you will not be able to eat commercial ketchup/sauce again

Tomato Chilli Pickle. Two batches: one last weekend (in the photo) and one this weekend (that’s another 4.5 kg preserved).  I’ve never made it before but, man, is this stuff good.  We’ve been eating it with everything from spreading it on sandwiches to an accompaniment for curries.

Semi-dried tomatoes (another 3.25 kg down). I also decided to finally use my dehydrator.  I’ve had it for over 3 years and it was a failed New Year’s Resolution from 2011 to use it.  Funny how facing down kilos of tomatoes that need to be used up quickly gets me to the point where I get over whatever was stopping me from using the dehydrator.  It’s so easy to use I wish I’d just used it sooner.  The recipe for the semi-dried tomatoes was from Out of the Bottle and needs to be kept in the fridge.  This preserving stuff really does spoil you, I don’t think I could eat semi-dried tomatoes from the store again, the flavour is just so intense in the batch I made.

We’ve also been eating tomatoes in all sorts of dishes from coleslaws to home-made baked beans and finally the box looks like this….

…with about another kg of the really good quality tomatoes being stored in the fridge

I’ve really enjoyed working my way through such a monster quantity of tomatoes.  Who knows, by next year I might even be bottling whole tomatoes so we no longer need to buy the tinned variety….

Where do you come from?

Just a quick one today.  WordPress has introduced a new feature where I can see what country people visiting my blog are coming from.  I find it really interesting and I thought you might too.

In the last three months (so pretty much since I’ve returned to blogging), the top five countries that YOU come from have been (in order from highest to lowest):

1. USA
2. Australia
3. UK
4. Turkey (Hi to everyone from Turkey, in the nicest possible way I never would have guessed you’d be in my top five, I love it that you are though!)
5.  New Zealand

And I have people coming from another NINETEEN countries so TWENTY FOUR countries in total, including  Colombia, Croatia, France,  India, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, The Netherlands, South Africa,  Vietnam….

How absolutely fantastic that you are coming from so many different places. I hope you all enjoy this space. Welcome!

A farmers’ market cornucopia: tomatoes

The last week or so it’s been raining and raining and raining.  Signficant parts of the state have been flooded (and other states too).

And the tomatoes don’t like the rain much either.  So at the farmers market this morning I picked up this enormous box of slightly spotty tomatoes for just $15.

I know what I’m doing this weekend…

A farmers’ market cornucopia: February 2012

These photos are from a trip to my local farmers’ market in mid-February.  I like that I am now starting to get a selection of seasonal snapshots of what we are eating at different times of the year.  You can see what we were eating last summer here or  last winter here.

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.