Kitchen Diaries: Preserves of epic proportions

Encouraged by my friend's newly created food blog, and my flatmate and I sitting in the kitchen obsessing over complicated desserts (macarons, anyone?), I decided to revisit here. I think the reason why I never really got very far with this blog is because I always forgot to take pictures of what I'd made, and felt that it would be pointless to update with recipes when I had no accompanying photos. Because, let's face it, loads of people read food blogs not just for the recipes, but for all the photos of amazing food. I'm also not that great at photographing food to make it look mouth-wateringly appetising; unless it's already pretty and delicate I quite often end up with a picture of something resembling mush, even though it usually tastes a lot better than the picture implies.

Anyway, I digress; I realised that over a year has passed since I last touched this blog, and that I must have a backlog of food photos on my computer, some of which have to be decent. Thinking back to last summer (as it is difficult to recall the exact nature of my kitchen adventures past then), I remembered going to my cousin's house to make preserves. We made a lot and the whole thing took about 2 days, including picking some of the ingredients (she has loads of fruit trees in her garden) and a trip to tesco which yielded a massive amount of sugar and vinegar.

This is what we did...

Massive pot full of freshly picked blackberries

Yes, this is really the amount of sugar that goes into jam

Boiling crab apples for crab apple jelly

If you don't know what crab apples are, they're basically like tiny, sour apples. You can't eat them raw, and I think the trees are grown mainly as ornamental plants. My cousin and I found a recipe for crab apple jelly, so thought we might as well give it a try. To make the jelly, you just boil loads of crab apples and then strain through a sieve like so (please take note of our very advanced juice collecting technique...one of the many uses for Yellow Pages):

After it's been left to strain for a night, you boil the juice with lots of sugar (naturally) and then stick it in jars to set. The end result?

Not the most attractive picture, but yeah. We added some herbs from the garden to give it a little extra flavour. If you're wondering what it tastes like, I don't really know how to describe it besides saying that it's really sweet, and goes really well with roast meat. So kind of in the same league as redcurrant jelly or apple sauce.

Another less conventional preserve we decided to try making was some spicy preserved pears. These actually turned out really nice and were extremely simple, much easier than making jam and having to worry about it not setting/all your teeth falling out from the crazy amount of sugar you ingest tasting it every minute (seriously, it is unavoidable when you're waiting for a huge pot of the stuff to be ready. We felt sick after a couple of hours).

Peel. Chop. Add sugar and spices. Boil.

Then stick in jars with syrup and cloves!

On the same day, we also made spicy plum and apple chutney. I think this actually turned out being the best thing we made, mainly cos I love chutney, especially if it has a bit of sweetness. I gave a few jars to people as presents and they all said they really liked it too!

Fresh organic apples and plums (dead wasp content 2%)