August 18, 2015
We spent the weekend fruit picking and jam making in the beautiful East Sussex countryside. It's still not peak season but we managed to pick 4kg of blackberries, 1 kg of mirabelles, 1 kg of red plums, not bad for an hour of picking. Apparently mirabelles are quite hard to find so we were lucky to find a couple of trees with fruit a plenty!
Our friend has this great fifties preserving book, with funny tips for the 'modern housewife' and we made traditional blackberry jelly and mirabelle jam. The blackberry jelly turned out perfect, not too hard or runny and tastes delicious! The mirabelle jam was another winner, although some of the fruits were slightly burnt, but we think it added a subtle burnt toffee flavour. There were a few moments where we thought the jelly and jam may have gone past the ideal setting stage, but with some patience and a lot of testing, we made 9 jars of lovely jam with less than half of the fruit we picked (most people go out on a saturday night, we make jam!).
We used our beautiful handmade wooden spoons for jam making. Now we are hooked on preserving we are looking forward to the lovely Newton & Pott's new book, launching this week called 'The modern Preserver'.
Thanks to Kate Sherman and her family for a fun weekend of fruit picking and jam making.
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