Having accomplished this bit of fun-ness I needed to get moving and do something with the fruit that is coming out of my ears! Last week I spent a couple of days making red currant jam (I refuse to filter the juice and make jelly!)
But this week is the beginning of the apricots. Last evening Gordon & I went and picked two big boxes of apricots off our loaded tree. This afternoon there were enough ripe apricots to make jam. Now I'm not a sugar Nazi, but when the recipe on the pectin box calls for 2 cups of fruit and 4 cups of sugar (no, I didn't mix that up... 2x1!) I just can't abide that. So I Googled apricot jam recipes and found this very delightful and cleverly written recipe by some dude named Jens with more realistic ratios of 1 fruit to 3/4 c sugar. I used Jens recipe.
The texture part comes in here... the apricots start out somewhat firm, get a little gooshy as I chopped them up, then went to a wonderfully slimmy stage as the sugar was mixed in. As it started cooking it starts to foam (1/2 tsp. butter solves this problem quite well. Last week I had to keep taking partly cooked jam out of the currant mixture because it just kept getting bigger and bigger and wanting to boil all over my stove... but I foiled it with quick spooning. I like the butter idea better.). The longer it cooks the more syrupy it becomes with chunks of apricot-y goodness floating in the mix. Now it is residing in 8 pint mason jars waiting to be opened and spread on hot toast this winter!
At the same time I was cooking the apricot jam I was texturizing with strawberries too. (Have you ever realized how bumply strawberries are with all of those little seeds?) I bought a flat on Saturday for family dinner and not too many got eaten. I used the aforementioned pectin (with half the amount of sugar, thank you very much) and made freezer jam. I used the potato masher to squish these up, then because it was looking a little lumpy, I put half of them in the blender and whirred them minimally. Gordon helped again with stirring and ladling into containers as both jams got finished at the same time. (Not such good planning on my part.) Now there are also 7 pints of strawberry-goodness in the fridge waiting to "set up" before being moved to the freezer.
So that is what my tactile and visual textures are all about "this day"!
Later... more playing...
5 comments:
Ooooo! I like this one even better! You're giving me so many ideas. Thank you!
Love you,
Cindy
Your Awesome and your blog is Number one with me!
Yeah, I love textures! This looks great and you can send some of your fruit my way anytime. I love freezer jam myself!
I'm back again, thanks for your suggestion about the blog. If I change it, will everything else remain the same, like my header etc? I'm kind of afraid to touch it
You make me want to can something and I HATE CANNING! Ann Boucher truly is a master canner, and I found out the hard way how tricky it can be all by yourself. When I was at Snow College, I came home for a weekend and my mom had asked it I could help can some tomatoes since she would be gone and they had to be done. Well, she had taught me well and I thought I could HELP with the process. HELP, I said. Well, I found myself tackling 2 large boxes of tomatoes alone while my dad and younger brothers watched football! Men....Grrrr....
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