Pickled and Jammed

I have been so productive I am not going to bother writing up every recipe individually. The highlight of the weekend was the jam biling over the hob and the floor and even, briefly, catching on fire. Runner up was one of the rabbits making a run for it out the kitchen floor and sitting out on the lawn in saturday's torrential rain evading my best efforts to get her back inside.

Over the weekend I made –

1)Fruit Salad Jam – peaches, apricots, bananas and the passionfruit pulp I made last week. It’s very pretty but I’m not at all sure about the bananas although Gus the bunny got pretty excited about them– There is something wrong about cooked banana I think. I will have to find someone unsuspecting to try it out on.

2)Apricot Sauce – No dramas here – believe it or not

3)Gooseberry jam (green) – required me to add absolutely ridiculously quantities of sugar and them boil quickly. I think it took about 30 mins for my poor ceramic hob to get it back up to a boil. Jam is not perhaps as green as it might have been!

4)Gooseberry jam – I had to pass this lot through the colander after the fruit was cooked. I have learnt that you lose a lot of bulk by passing something through a colander. I have also learnt not to go off and read the newspaper while you are boiling the jam after adding the sugar. I had about a 1’ square bright red boiling hot puddle on the floor. Very bad. Very very bad. I fear both the kitchen and I may be permanently sticky.

5)Tomato Sauce – Things which are predominantly made out of tomatoes seem to have a very low yield. I have a jar of rather murky looking tomato sauce, I don’t think we’ll throw out the Heinz in a hurry

6)Mustard pickle – is very VERY yellow. Scary yellow, and quite watery. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it – cauliflower, onion, green tomatoes and cucumber in runny yellow sauce – Edmonds are you pulling another orange sponge pudding trick?

7)Peach chutney – made quite a lot of this using white flesh peaches so I’m hoping it is ok to use white fleshed peaches – they were $2 a kg cheaper than normal peaches. Please don’t tell me if it isn’t ok to use them, all will be revealed in the fullness of time.

8)Plum Sauce – very similar to apricot sauce, again no dramas

9)Tomato Relish – is relatively dry, but smells pretty good.

And I have pretty much finished the pickles, chutneys and sauces section. How exciting! I am slightly worried that with this hurdle passed I might need to tackle something else – like all the livers and kidneys lurking within the pages. Not all that happy about the though of that.

I’ll finish with some photos for those requiring visual stimulation
1)Gus begging for banana
2) Soggy Roo
3) not so green gooseberry jam
4)Scary yellow mustard pickle
5) Apricot sauce
6) Tomato sauce - note use of CLEAN chux cloth as emergency muslin
7)Plum Sauce
8)Tomato Relish
9)Fruit salad jam