I was faffing around on Saturday trying to convince myself to get my act together enough to Make The Apple Pie, and mumbled, “Or maybe I could just make a blackberry apple crumble, that’d be easier,” in the vicinity of our guest, who said, “I didn’t know that was an option!!!”, thus indicating I should do that. :) I poked around the internet and couldn’t find a recipe I really liked, so I kind of invented one. It went like this: Kit’s Blackberry-Apple Crumble 1 oz butter 1 oz sugar…
I’ve been going out and getting nettle-stung in search of the wild blackberries that are growing in our garden. (Nettles offend me mightily. Plants do not try to kill you in the land of my people, at least, nothing but Devil’s Club, and Devil’s Club looks like it wants to kill you from forty feet away.) Anyway, I’m apparently too easily taunted by blackberries and when I see them I feel obliged to get them immediately instead of preparing myself sufficiently against the nettles, so it’s this kind of adversarial…
Iiiiiii have made an aaaaaaamaaaaaaazing batch of strawberry rhubarb jam. Ted, who likes zingy strawberry/rhubarb jam, thought there wasn’t enough rhubarb in mine generally, so I did half and half instead of favouring the strawberries, and it’s rrrrrrrrrrrrrreeaaaaaaaaaallllly good. I used jam sugar because I didn’t have enough regular sugar, and I thought I might have a little too much s/r for a kilo of jam sugar, which is often soft anyway. So I took what I’ve learned about unripe apples and got one and chopped it up and threw…
I was in town yesterday and saw a fruit vendor with 1-kilo flats of strawberries for €5 each, which I thought was an excellent deal. I bought two, came home with them, and went back out not much later to get (other things also, but) four more. The young lady at the booth looked at me a bit askance when I came up and asked for four flats. I explained I was making jam, and she said, “Oh! Okay. I was wondering if you maybe had a bit of an…
Not very well, as it turns out. I’ve been on a regular jam-making roll here, having made strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, strawberry-rhubarb, peach and cherry in the past week or so. Despite my cries of woe, the strawberry did in fact set up, so I have a wide array of lovely jams. The cherry, though. Last year’s attempt at cherry jam was Too Soft, IMHO, and this year in a misguided attempt to make it set up better I essentially doubled the pectin. It worked. Somewhat too well. :) So this…