This year’s wild plum/cherry plum jam

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 10 August 2011 in cooking, preserving, wild food | 4 comments

I wasn’t planning to make any jam from the mysterious plum-like fruit that grows outside our kitchen window but when John said he wasn’t sure if he could be bothered making wine, I had to do something with our first harvest. And boy, am I glad I did.

It was about 1kg of mysterious plums (pre-stoning), about 300ml of water, about 750g of sugar and 2tsp of vanilla extract/flavouring.

I’m not sure whether it’s the vanilla or the fact that the plums were super mega ripe when I used them but YUM. I think it’s far nicer than last year (although to be fair, it is a while since I ate last year’s jam so I might be misremembering it/confusing it with something else).

I only made about 3lb because I wanted to make some ketchup with the rest of the plums I had to hand (that’s cooking as I type) but it’s so nice that I want to make more straight-away. Thankfully it looks like we’ll get a few more kilos of fruit yet!

Lovely Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 26 January 2011 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 6 comments

I mentioned on Monday that I made a batch of lemon curd while my frustrating, sticky marmalade was boiling away.

Lemon curd is far easier and more fun to make than marmalade, and oh my wow, it’s delicious.

It doesn’t have a long shelf life though – what with the butter and the eggs – but I don’t mind having to make it regularly because it’s so quick and easy that it’s not a problem.

Compared to jams from foraged or grown fruit (where the only expenses are sugar, a tiny bit of spice & energy), this is expensive – lots of bought-in items. Using eggs from our own chickens, it worked out at about 70p a jar; if we’d had to buy in good eggs, it would have been about £1 a jar – not break-the-bank expensive and it is very very nice, but not the cheapest either (the blackberry jam I made last autumn worked out at about 25p a jar since the only thing I had to buy was sugar). It’s a good way to use up egg gluts – something we’ll have to get more proactive with now the girls are laying more.

Buttery Lemon Curd recipe

Ingredients
5 large lemons
5 medium-to-large eggs
250g of butter (!), room temperature
400g of golden caster sugar
2tsp of cornflour

Makes just under 3lbs of lovely lemon curd

Spicy plum chutney recipe: plum & chilli jam

Posted by louisa on Friday 24 September 2010 in preserving, recipes, wild food | 5 comments

With the last of the plums from the wild tree next to our house, I made a delicious spicy plum and chilli chutney.

The plums are slightly smaller than cultivated ones but highly flavoured – both sweet & tart at the same time. Yum!

My Spicy Marrow Chutney recipe uses flavours inspired by the Indian sub-continent but this spicy plum chutney uses flavours from further east than that.

It’s not a thick jelly-ish jam but is delicious spread thinly on a cracker and topped with a piece of tasty cheese. Mmm, cheese.

Super easy blackberry jam recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 September 2010 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 11 comments

I love cooking but I have a surprisingly low tolerance for faff – particularly faff involving large quantities of sticky substances that need to sit for a long amount of time. I’m also very clumsy, live with an equally clumsy boy, and have less than graceful pets. In other words, preserves that involve the use of jelly bags are not for me.

Most blackberry jam recipes are more like blackberry jelly recipes – they involve straining out the juice and using that to make to the finished pulp-free seedless product. However, if you don’t mind partial berries and seeds, this blackberry jam is super easy and tastes really, really good!

Adventures in Preserving: insert your own hilarious jam pun here

Posted by louisa 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!