Jam tomorrow

Or rather jam today since I made the jam late last night out of one pound of cherry plums picked near the Water Eaton park and Ride on Monday (always good when you can incorporate a bit of fruit picking into the commute).



Recipe:

Wash and stone the cherry plums. I have to tell you that this is tricky as cherry plums are as small as cherries but their stones are as fiddly to extract as those of plums. It's the best of both worlds!
Weigh the stoned fruit, place in a saucepan with the juice of 1 lemon per pound of fruit (i.e. 1 pound of fruit = 1 lemon, 2 pounds = 2 lemons, etc.), and simmer until the juices start to run.
Add just over 1/2 the weight of the fruit in sugar and bring to the boil.
Continue to boil (stirring all the time to prevent burning) until the mixture goes thick and jammy*.
Pour into sterilized jars (I just put mine in a pan of boiling water and get them out using tongs and a tea towel) and leave to cool and set.

Eat!



* it might be that we need a better thermometer (rather than the one we use for milk frothing) but I've never had any luck with either trying to get jam to the setting point of 104 C or doing put-it-on-a-cold-saucer-and-see-if-it-wrinkles thing.

Gleanings

We've been on a bit of a jam making kick of late. Back at the end of July I made some semi-successful (because only semi-set) strawberry jam. A couple of weeks ago the boyfriend and I saw that the first ripe blackberries were appearing so last Sunday we set out with a punnet on a serious gathering expedition.

Even though the ripe blackberries were still vastly outnumbered by those which were still red (or even green) we managed to fill our tub pretty easily and when we got home we discovered we had over 2 pounds worth.*



I put a few into little shortcrust pies and the boyfriend commandeered the rest for making jelly (i.e. jam made from juice, rather than the wobbly stuff you find in trifle). This was a rather terrifying process involving boiling the fruit and then ladling into a jelly bag suspended from the legs of an upside down coffee table in the living room (with the beige carpet and cream curtains!). Miraculously there were no spillages and we ended up with 600ml of juice which the boyfriend boiled up with a pound of sugar to make enough jelly to fill one and a half jars.



The boyfriend used the milk frothing thermometer to make sure that the temperature was high enough and his has set completely.

It's lovely stuff and now that I've seen how it's done I'm keen to have another go. I'm hoping to gather more blackberries at the weekend and enough elderberries to make blackberry and elderberry jam.

* I think the most exciting point of the whole day for the boyfriend was when he switched on the telly before tea time to discover that Jamie Oliver had the same set of scales as us.