Yesterday’s juice is today’s jelly!
It was a marathon afternoon and the house got to 75 degrees. But the juice turned out to be great jelly and we only had to make two trips to the grocery store. We had one batch that was soft set but otherwise both kinds set up well.
This is 23 pints of jelly and 30.5 half pints. I shared some with my aunt and my dad and still stocked my pantry stores. I still need to make a batch of cherry jam and can some more tomato sauce.
Happy Canning!!
My dad hand picked some grapes from the family farm. I forgot to grab pics of the grapes before we did the cook and crush. But the juice is GORGEOUS!
I got this cooked and filtered and ready to turn into jelly. I think we are going to clear the decks tomorrow and do a big jelly cook. I still have my apple juice in the freezer as well. All I need is a metric poop ton of sugar and lots of boxes of pectin.
Happy Canning!!
In non fibery news, my summer apple tree did very well this year. I harvested close to four plastic grocery bags of decent apples. I probably composted 50 times as much due to bird and animal loss. Or just failing to pick and they got rotten. And that is okay, I am not a commercial apple producer.
I cleaned up the apples and cut out all the bad or buggy bits and dropped into a pressure cooker. My preferred method is jelly from juice so I like to harvest that from the fruit. I cook as much of the apple including core an seed to develop as much natural pectin as possible
The juice is coming out very deep rose colored this year with the peel influencing the color. I use cheese close to harvest the juice. The kids didn’t really appreciate the apple sauce pulp flavor so I chose not to try to salvage any of that. I gave some to my friends with chickens and composted the rest.
It is crazy back to school time again so I don’t have capacity to make jelly right now so I sterilized several jars and I’m freezing the juice until I have time to work it. I am hoping that I can also get my hands on more wine grapes to re-stash my grape jelly stash as well this year.
And then I would just do a large cook day for jelly processing. Hopefully with extra hands to help!
Happy Canning!!
Late August around here means APPLE SEASON! Our crop was small but might this year but I think I have enough to do two batches of apply jelly.
It literally dangerously hot here in Kansas with 100-110 degree temperatures without the heat index. But apples ripen when they want. I took my time to wash and cut out the bad parts and pressure cook out the goodness.
After the juice is complete I made the basic cooked apply jelly recipe from the SureJell boxed instructions. This batch set but a very soft set. Not enough that I want to recook but I think I will make some tweaks for the second batch. It’s too hot for that!
OOOH! And I did something very environmentally friendly with the canning and sterilizing water. Stay tuned later this week!
Happy Canning!!
I got a wild hair this weekend to make some homemade jam. I had 8 cups of cherries in the freezer from my family tree and some frozen ripe strawberries from the local U-Pick farm outside of town.
The kids and I worked for an entire morning to make three batches of jam, two cherry and one strawberry. The strawberry just came out so vibrant and well incorporated throughout. I find it mesmerizing! And they both taste really wonderful too!
I did use my food processor to breakup and crush the fruit fairly finely. I like jam with the whole fruit in it but I don’t like huge chunks as I spread on my carbohydrate platform. The kiddos have already consumed an ENTIRE jar of strawberry and can’t wait to pick more strawberries next year!
Happy Canning!!
Our apple tree is giving us a bountiful harvest this year! I have a daily ritual of picking the ripe apples every evening (and raking/scooping the fallen ones into the trash). I finally had a refrigerator bin full so the kiddos and I made jelly!
After A TON of cutting and de-bugging I ended up with two instant pots full of beautiful red apples. The tree was here when we moved in so we have no clue what kind they are. We just call them red apples, lol.
We painstakingly drained and filtered the apples for most of the morning. That left us with enough juice for three full batches of jelly.
And the apply flesh/pulp the kids and I ran through the food mill to make apple sauce. I’m not a fan of applesauce but PB and Jellybean gobbled it up!
Safe to say our winter stores are good to go for jelly. No doubt some of this will end up in Christmas gifts!
Happy Canning!!
Our current temperature in Kansas is roughly the surface of the sun with like 1,000% humidity. So why wouldn’t I want to haul out all my canning supplies and heat up my kitchen? I was having some anxiety related to world events and general unrest so I felt the need to make something. That feeling turned into one batch of strawberry rhubarb jam, two batches of blackberry jam, two batches of peach jam and one batch of strawberry jam.
Jellybean helped me off and on saying that he “didn’t like the hot and sticky parts”. Which we all know is almost the whole process. He did like how dark and ruby colored the blackberries cooked down into. All this fruit, except for the strawberries, was homegrown from my families gardens. To me this gave me a grounded feeling and a connection to people I can’t visit right now.
This project did make me feel a bit better. I did have a tiny bit of frustration when my peach jam didn’t set and I had to haul all the supplies back out to re-cook and add more pectin. But the re-do process did seem to work. Now I have some jelly stores for the next year and enough to give as gifts this holiday season.
How is everyone else coping lately?
My neighbor has a pear tree that was LOADED this year. I managed to be the recipient of two grocery sacks of pears this fall. I managed to get the bulk of them ripe at the same time and decided to make pear jelly.
The hubby did his best to keep the tiny humans away from the boiling hot liquids. I managed to get all the pear juice I needed and then sieved the pulp into pear-sauce for the kids.
In the end I got six pints of jelly. It is a very loose set though. I can tip my jars and see the contents move around and I see some juice on top. I need to consult my grandmother, the expert jelly maker, to see if this is a problem or not. I’m pretty sure you can attempt to re-set jelly but I’ll need to use the inter-webs.
But for now I’m feeling proud of this amber colored goodness!
When one has access to A) free babysitting and B) large volumes of tomatoes…..you make sauce!!! Here are my happy three pots of sauce bubbling away on the stove.
I only managed to burn myself once, spill a million times and actually finish the day with 20 pints of pure tomato goodness. My house uses this all the time instead of store bought sauce. Note: I don’t season my canned sauce. I prefer a blank canvas to be spiced up later.
How do you like your sauce?
This weekend my husband took Jellybean all by himself to the Kansas State Fair and to see his side of the family. You guys….just between you, me, and the blog….I haven’t had a weekend alone in my own house for THREE YEARS. Since before Jellybean was born, for real. I’ll let that sink in….and with the recent sleep jihad by Jellybean (we have been to a doctor and we all agree that he’s having legitimate allergy/sinus/bloody nose pain and issues….my baby has to have very minor surgery and it breaks my heart but it will help him and Lord knows we ALL need to sleep better)
But I digress, I had almost the whole weekend! Jellybean got me up multiple times between 4 and 7 am the night before so I decided to be industrious after they hit the road. I pulled seven or eight gallon bags of tomatoes frozen from our summer garden and started simmering tomato sauce. This is most the ingenious thing my grandma taught me. Since my tomatoes didn’t set enough at one time to make batches of sauce we freeze them in bags after being washed and de-stemmed. When you pull them out and dunk them in warm water the skins slough right off and the flesh can go right into the cook pot. There is no blanching or peeling….its amaze-balls!
It was hot and messy but in the end I made 3 1/2 pints of super hot jalapeno salsa for the hubby. And then 12 pints of plain tomato sauce for cooking. I’m sooo happy to be filling my pantry with these goodies for a fresh pick me up mid-winter!
I did a fair bit of knitting as well while the sauce was simmering. I’ll show you that later this week….stay tuned!
Happy Knitting!!
Michele plays with yarn, food, and music in Portland
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