From this:
To this: (in just three hours)
The plum trees have given us an astounding amount of fruit. Unfortunately, it all ripened over Christmas and I came home to kilos and kilos of plums rotting on the ground. My mum and I grabbed what we could though and mum set me up with a huge pot, a recipe and a “you’ll be right, dear. Jam making’s easy…see you later!”
So, with the jam making scene from Good Wives running through my head, I hovered over this pot of plums until they cooked down into pulp, added a huge amount of sugar and hovered some more in case it burned, tested it, poured it into jars and sealed them with jam seals (who’d have thought you could get such exotic culinary accessories from the supermarket).
And, d’you know what? Jam making is easy! And I felt so smug about my little row of jars that I made a plum chutney yesterday too. I’m not even sure if I like plum chutney, it’s just that I have plums coming out my ears and those jars do look very smart, and they do thrill me on so many levels: there’s the frugality aspect (those plums are free! Cue little dance of joy…), there’s the environmental aspect (you can’t get more local than the back yard), and then there’s the just-being-organised-enough-to-just-do-it aspect. Which is a pretty big one with me at the moment. I did it! I made jam. Woohoo me.
Oh! They are beautiful!
I pickled some onions once when I had only one child. I was very proud – and like you, I was amazed at the interesting things that the supermarket stocked in the way of preserves.
Comment by Mary — January 7, 2008 @ 4:32 pm
Oh, go you! I was pleasantly surprised just how easy the whole process was too (aside from getting the skins and stones out of the puree lol). We’re loving our jam and have given some to others.
Comment by Nikki — January 8, 2008 @ 8:47 am