Provisions

So, my garden isn’t feeding me but it’s ok. I have beer.

(Thanks to a very kind and generous friend who has shared his equipment in exchange for the space. Resource sharing is GREAT!)

Zucchini … jam?

I just spotted this on p. 85 of the April NZ Gardener. I am intrigued. I certainly still have plenty of zucchini…

 I’m just posting it here while I decide if it’s worth a go. I don’t know though. Zucchini and jam just don’t sit very well together in my mind. I do have a kilo of yellow zucchini sitting on my kitchen bench and that would look pretty as a jam. But on the other hand the yellow zucchini just can’t be beaten for its ability to be hidden in all sorts of dishes… Maybe someone else can have a go with this and let me know whether it really is edible!

Zucchini Jam

1 kg zucchini
1 kg of sugar
125g butter
juice and rind of 3 lemons

Peel and finely chop zucchini. Steam until tender enough to be put through a sieve of blender. Place the puree in a pot with the sugar, butter, finely grated lemon rind and lemon juice. Stir over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved.

Boil for 30 minutes, until the jam has a thick, creamy texture (similar to lemon honey). Pour into clean, hot jars and seal.

Harvesting

Steamed zucchini;
zucchini on pizza;
zucchini in pasta sauce;
zucchini fritters;
zucchini chocolate cake;
raw zucchini and bean dip…

and now, my new favourite:

Zucchini Loaf

3 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 ½ cups white sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 cup cooking oil
1 cup chopped walnuts
2 cups of grated zucchini
1 tsp vanilla essence

Sift dry ingredients, then add sugar, eggs, oil, walnuts, zucchini and vanilla. Mix well. Spoon into two lined loaf tins and bake slowly for 1-1 ½ hours, starting at 150 degrees C and increasing to 170.

This recipe is from Homegrown : how to sow, grow, harvest, pickle and preserve fresh fruit, herbs & vegetables from your garden / by Lynda Hallinan. (A New Gardener special edition). It’s my new favourite garden book and where I also found the recipe for the plum chutney I’ve been guzzling.

Jam Packed

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.