Where growing, making & good living come together

Super easy blackberry jam recipe

Posted by 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!


Super easy blackberry jam recipe

1kg of fruit – blackberries and peeled/cored apples (see note #1 below)
1kg of jam sugar (see note #2 below)
1 lemon (see note #3 below)
100ml of water

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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!

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