Its been a crazy week - not of the celebratory kind as the title suggests - just plain crazy! Even the weather has been crazy - dropping from 29 degrees the one day to 13 degrees four days later! (That’s degrees Celsius by the way). However, all is not lost...I have made 2 very unusual and particularly delicious jams! There are two Eugenia trees in my garden that are laden with berries at the moment. To be honest, the bright pink berries are more appealing to the eye than to the taste buds! They are slightly sourish (enough to make you screw up your face that your own mother wouldn’t recognise you if you happened to taste the wrong one!) and there is very little flesh - the sort of berry that you eat as you pick so that you can spit the pea-sized pips out on the ground and then skip a few seasons before you venture to taste them again. This year I decided to try turning them into jam....boy, was I in for a pleasant surprise!
It’s quite a lot of work cleaning the fruit and removing the stalks and then the cooked fruit has to drain overnight (not my favourite as I like “quick and easy” to make jams) but the effort was worth it. A large jug full of fruit yielded 10 small bottles of delicious jam which colour is equally as appealing to the eye. The sweetness of the jam is surprising for the the sourness of the fruit but then I did use a lot of sugar!
My next culinary adventure was the Cherry Guavas! Why an adventure you may ask? I probably chose the windiest day of the year to be picking fruit - with winds gusting up to gale force I was blown into the tree more than once and lost a fair amount of my pickings in doing so! However, the tree is laden with fruit and acts as a large fruit bowl for the birds so I needed to get to the fruit before they tasted each and every guava. So why pick in the wind? The branches are light and very flexible so the birds leave the fruit alone when it is very windy! (Grin)
Once again it is one of those jams that need to strain overnight in a muslin bag and again it was well worth exercising my patience. Though a kilogram only yielded 3 small bottles of jam it is yummy yummy yummy!!! Even though cherry guavas can also be on the tart side of sour, this time I used less sugar per cup of cooked fruit and the result is slightly sourish jam with a hint of sweetness that it could easily be eaten with cold meats. I am delighted with the result.
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| Cherry Guava Jam and Lebanese style pickled Cauliflower |
Essential advice for the gardener : Grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbour and always make thyme for loved ones!
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