Adventures in cookery

[lizwilliams]

(This is one for the cooks and the gardeners. Ignore if you don't give a toss).

Following an attempt last week to produce gooseberry jelly*, I've now done some more with the big, pale golden-green gooseberries that we've got in the garden right now. It seems to be setting but is a bit runny. If I can get some mackerel at the market tomorrow, I'm going to do a gooseberry sauce with it: this is a traditional southern English thing.

I also just picked a cucumber. We have tomatoes like little green bullets, but they're ripening; a lot of raspberries and blackcurrants, a magnificent eggplant which hasn't produced anything yet but is flowering, and beans, peas, chard, potatoes, and lettuces. Zucchini have flowered and there is a little one on the way.

Onions: hmmmm. Jury is out.

* Not that I'd ever admit to failure, but if anyone likes vaguely fruit-flavoured toffee and has a really big hammer, then email me. You get a free glass jar, which you'll be able to work out your tensions on by shattering it.

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

This is a very simple recipe, but there's an issue with the timing:

- cover fruit with water and simmer gooseberries until soft
- strain the gooseberries
- add 1lb of sugar to every pint of liquid, heat until sugar dissolves, then boil until it starts to set (this is the tricky bit - you have to do a push test with a spoon on a plate).

Doesn't involve pectin, however, so it's more the English sense of a jelly with a jam, and it's intended as a savoury accompaniment to meat rather than the sort of thing you put on bread. The jam/jelly differences between the US and us have confused me for years!

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

'jelly than a jam', sorry.

[lisamantchev.livejournal.com]

I've never actually made jelly, although I have the little straining contraption (and hear about it from my frugal grandmother every year when I throw away the apple peels from making applesauce... "Apple jelly, Lisa! Apple jelly!")

One of these days, I swear I will try it.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Ah, grandmothers! My mum has always made a lot of jelly - mainly redcurrant. This is the first time I've had a place with fruit bushes, so I'm making the most of it.

I did a gooseberry sauce with some fish last night and it worked really well - it's actually just pureed gooseberries.

[lisamantchev.livejournal.com]

The first year we rented the farmhouse, the pear tree had about ten crates worth of fruit on it... out of necessity, I learned how to can a pear chutney, pears in almond syrup and pear-sauce. Then we bought the practice, and the entire backside of the building is lined with blackberry bushes.

The new house has a baby orchard: two tiny cherry trees, two apple trees, a pear tree and what might be plums or apricots. Check back with me in September and see if I've survived the canning... ;)