[Martha] Seriously, I need to find my canning icon
(Of course, it took me something like 15 minutes to figure out where I'd saved Hourglass to, so it's also possible that I shouldn't go over six months without organizing my hard drive. Ahem.)
Raspberries (local) were on sale at the grocery store the other night. Good prices on half-flats.
Lillian loves them, so I picked some up.
Wait, no, Lillian loves them, so I used that as an excuse to pick some up.
Having finally managed to get over my dislike of spending money on raspberries (Mother used to have buckets full in the yard, but in the last couple of years, not so much), I really wanted to attempt Lady Fettiplace's jam.
Plus, I'd made some pectin Friday night, so I needed to see if it worked before going off on a quest for green apples.
Anyhow. The jam I have now is lovely, and made without commercial pectin, but it's not Lady Fettiplace's. Why is that?
Because, apparently, organic sugar refuses to behave properly, and I could NOT for the life of me get it to form a nice hard chunk of crystallized sugar. No, no. Every single time the syrup went dry, I had light and fluffy clouds of organic sugar left in the pot. After three attempts, I put the raspberries on the hot sugar with some pectin, mashed things up, and set them on a fast, hard boil just to the setting point.
Yield from two pounds berries: 1 full pint jar, 4 half pint jars, one half-filled half pint jar for immediate gratification.
And once again, I'm out of jars. At least the small ones.
Raspberries (local) were on sale at the grocery store the other night. Good prices on half-flats.
Lillian loves them, so I picked some up.
Wait, no, Lillian loves them, so I used that as an excuse to pick some up.
Having finally managed to get over my dislike of spending money on raspberries (Mother used to have buckets full in the yard, but in the last couple of years, not so much), I really wanted to attempt Lady Fettiplace's jam.
Plus, I'd made some pectin Friday night, so I needed to see if it worked before going off on a quest for green apples.
Anyhow. The jam I have now is lovely, and made without commercial pectin, but it's not Lady Fettiplace's. Why is that?
Because, apparently, organic sugar refuses to behave properly, and I could NOT for the life of me get it to form a nice hard chunk of crystallized sugar. No, no. Every single time the syrup went dry, I had light and fluffy clouds of organic sugar left in the pot. After three attempts, I put the raspberries on the hot sugar with some pectin, mashed things up, and set them on a fast, hard boil just to the setting point.
Yield from two pounds berries: 1 full pint jar, 4 half pint jars, one half-filled half pint jar for immediate gratification.
And once again, I'm out of jars. At least the small ones.