I have just finished tasting the blackberry jelly that I made yesterday, on the home made bread I made and froze a couple of weeks ago. What a pleasure! I really like the process of jelly making because the jelly will seal and preserve themselves, no hot water bath needed! I have noticed from the pleathura of recipes I have found, that you can’t really wreck jelly. I thought I boiled it too long… nope, it turned out just fine. I thought I added the ingredients in the wrong order… nope again! Turned out just fine.
Jelly is so easy to make that you can even make jelly from canned juice (says my mom), which means I can definately juice some apples and make jelly! If only you didn’t need nearly twice as much sugar as you do juice. Perhaps I can devise a recipe using honey. Pictures here, recipe here.
Yesterday and today my mom and I canned peaches… millions of peaches! Actually, only about 60 lbs. We grossed about 33 quarts and two batches of jam from local BC Okanagen peaches and honey because organic has been too expensive to can. It took us a while to get a system down, but by this morning we were very efficient and tidy. Now that we have figured out the process, I can’t wait for beets and pears to ripen!!!
I’m lucky because my mom canned for quite a few years when I was younger, and my grandma was quite the homemaker as well. My mom has passed on dozens of quart and pint jars and all her canning tools to me, which makes getting into the game easy. Its interesting to see how the instruments have evolved through the generations by looking at some of my grandmas canning jars, with parafin wax sealing for preserves, rubber rings and glass lids to our rubber rimmed lids and rims that we use today.
This round we tried to seal the preserves with wax, but realized shortly after that it is no longer recomended due to the improper seal the wax tends to make. Obviously we did it wrong when we noticed the juice seaping out the top of the wax! Oh well, I guess we will just have to eat it!
We used a preserve recipe that called for honey instead of sugar, but unfortunately it didn’t set - we will continue our search for a local way to make jam!
I finally gave our website a much needed overhaul. Wedding and honeymoon photos are HERE! I added the Flickr Photo Album widget which displays a sample of recent photos from our Flickr account in the side bar and generates the gallery under the “photos” link in the top menu. The pages are a little slow to load at first as there are quite of few pictures in each gallery. Leave some comments if you wish.