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Adventures in Preserving: insert your own hilarious jam pun here

Posted by on Wednesday 15 September 2010 in cooking, growing, preserving, wild food | 4 comments

I had yesterday largely away off work/from my computer in order to catch up on my preserving.

As I tweeted last night:

Today I’ve made 5.5lbs of spicy marrow chutney, 3lbs of marrow & chilli jam, 4lbs of blackberry & apple jam, & 3lbs of spicy plum chutney.

Also made 3lbs of ratatouille & 2 giant marrow cakes. All using stuff from the garden; recipes for everything to follow on the blog soon!

And as I added this morning:

I have a blister on my hand from hacking up all the marrow yesterday. It’s like when I got a blister from too much spinning. I’m hardcore!

All the courgettes/marrow were from the garden – I used five out of six of the marrows I harvested the other day, and had collected 2.5lbs of courgettes for the ratatouille. The ratatouille also included tomatoes from the garden.

The spicy plum chutney was made from the remainder of the plums from the tree outside the kitchen, the ones that are either wild plums or cherry plum but either way, tasty plums. And the blackberries are from the field next door to our house. (Both fruits had been frozen for a couple of weeks but needed to come out to make room for the ratatouille and marrow cakes.)

I was truly exhausted by the end of the cooking session and when I count it in jars, it doesn’t feel like I’ve got a lot to show for all the work – but when I think that along with the last batch I made, it’ll more than fulfil our jam & chutney needs for a year, it feels like a lot more worthwhile.

Some of the recipes I kinda made up on the fly, others I tweaked from existing recipes – I’ll post them all with my modifications over the next week or so — let me know if you have any preference for ones to see first!

4 Comments

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  1. alastair

    Hi Louisa,

    Have you got a recipe for the marrow & chilli jam? Made some last year and it was fantastic, however the recipe has now vanished and we’ve exhautsed all last years supplies.

    Thanks

    • louisa

      Hi Alastair,

      Short answer: unfortunately not.

      Long answer: I made that last thing in the day and as a result of general knackeredness, I didn’t document the recipe as well as I normally do. It is also written in a notebook I can’t currently find.

      However, given our current marrow situation, I’ll be making some more in the next couple of weeks and I WILL find the notebook so I can roughly recreate last year’s recipe. I’ll publish the resulting recipe as soon as I can :)

      If you make your own in the meantime though, do share your recipe!

      -louisa :)

      • alastair

        Hi Louisa,

        Did you happen upon your recipe again? We’ve turned the house upside down and I’ve search the net backwards (maybe that’s why it can’t be found…)

  2. alastair

    Found!
    Hi Louisa we’ve found the recipe again and here it is:

    4lb marrow
    2oz whole ginger
    4lb preserving sugar
    2oz garlic
    ~¾oz red chillies (depending on heat)
    1½oz salt
    1 breakfast cup malt vinegar

    Time: 1 – 1½ hours
    Method:
    1:The marrow should be weighed after peel and seeds have been removed.

    2:Cut the marrow into cubes (bit bigger than a sugar cube), put them in the pan with sugar, and simmer to a pulp; then add the finely chopped garlic and chillies, the ginger well bruised and tied in muslin, the salt and the vinegar.

    3:Boil gently (very gently at start in case the sugar catches) until the mixture is quite thick, remove the ginger, bottle and make airtight when cold.

    By Lydia Chatterton, 1947

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