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My newest hobby is making berry or fruit jams. I didn’t suddenly decide that I wanted to become a hobby preserver. Rather, this hobby developed as a solution for what to do with the abundance of berries and fruits our gardens were yielding. It started with the gooseberries. To eat these plump little berries in their natural state can be a somewhat daunting culinary experience as they are quite tart. It was challenging for me to get one down, never mind the large bowls that our two bushes produced. I asked my husband if I could make a gooseberry jam and he quickly responded in the affirmative, recounting that a jam is how he enjoyed gooseberries as a child. Excellent. I looked up easy gooseberry jam recipes and was delighted to find out that I did not need to add pectin and cooking time was less than an hour.
The recipe said that the hardest part of making gooseberry jam was in picking and prepping the berries. As the berries were already picked, I thought “How hard can prepping the berries be …” It took two of us almost two hours to de-stem and prep about 8 cups of gooseberries. However, the next day I decided that the satisfaction I felt in making an amazingly sweet and tasty homegrown jam, far exceeded the tedious work required in berry prep, and I was hooked!
The currants came next. Picking the currants was a lot more work than picking the gooseberries. I also noticed that currant bushes, especially when you get your face right in there, don’t smell that great. It’s a weird, somewhat off-putting smell which is strange because currants, themselves, don’t really have an odor. Nevertheless, it took me a full week to pick all the currants which were needed to make my batch of jam. This time, the berry prep work was minimal and aside from some thorough washing, there was little else to do other than to remove a stray stem or two. Again, the jam came out tasting great and I soon set my sights on our blueberry bushes. To protect these precious, budding berries (blueberries are my personal favorite), I had my husband put nets over them to keep the birds away while they ripened. The result was 4 precious cups of blueberries and one jar of my best tasting jam to date. The blueberries, however, were the last berry crop we had…
Rather than feel disappointed that my jam making days were (perhaps) over, I realized that I could make a tomato sauce using our plentiful crop. Then I read the recipes (and the salmonella warnings) and decided that tomato canning was not going to be a part of my preserving hobby because the effort and resources involved seemed to catapult the process from that of a hobby into that of hard WORK. However, and not to fret that I am out of things to put in a jar, we have several peach trees in our orchard that have lots of orange, fuzzy fruits growing…
Ripe? Ripe?
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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