Are You Jealous Yet?

After this weekend's crab apple jelly success, I decided to take advantage of a surplus of blackberries and make blackberry jelly. I've never made blackberry jelly before. Nor has my mother. Nor even the folks from whom I got the berries. Still, I like blackberries and this year's crop is particularly good (all the rain, I'm sure) so it seemed like a good idea. My sister and I went up to our cousin's farm and she borrowed one of their four wheelers to get to the berry patch. Which is less of a patch and more of everywhere along the four wheeler trails. We set to work picking berries and came out with 3 quarts, which is about what I figured we needed. Of course, our cousin gave us another bucketful because she'd been picking mostly for the sake of picking and had way more berries than she needed. It was difficult to walk away from all the berries. Everywhere I looked were big, fat, juicy, ripe blackberries.



I brought the berries home and washed them. Then I tossed them in a pot with some water and simmered them to mush. Despite how they look in the pot, they were BLACKberries when I started.




I mashed the mush, and strained it through a wire mesh sieve. It worked better than expected, and much easier than cheesecloth.




Look at all those seeds. Why on earth would anybody make jam out of these things? It wouldn't be a peanut butter and jam sandwich, it would be peanut butter and seeds. Jelly is a much better idea.




I added sugar. Lots of sugar. It's scary how much sugar is put into jams and jellies.




It's kind of cool the way the sugar absorbs some of the juice and then sort of creates a protective barrier around the rest of the sugar. It takes a lot of stirring to make it all dissolve.




Then the boiling and adding of pectin, as you'll recall from the crab apple adventure. We also have the "scary boiling up and almost over the edge of the pot." You're forced to turn the heat down, but you can't turn it down so much that it stops boiling. Very touch and go.



You'll have to remember the jelly pouring and wax pouring from the crab apple adventure, as it is most difficult to pour the jelly and take pictures at the same time. You'll also have to cross your fingers that the jelly sets up over the next couple days. Because if it doesn't, nobody will be getting any blackberry jelly good friend or not. If it does set up, it's some good jelly, I can tell you that much. I tasted it and it's superb. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Almost too sweet, but not quite. I may be forced to try another batch and boil it longer in the hopes it will set up better.

By the by, does anybody have any recipes for making juice out of this jelly juice? The juice I get for making into jelly is really more of a syrup. I think it would make a great juice for drinking, though. Same with the crap apple. Might be fun to make and can or freeze juice.

Again, I have calculated my approximate cost of making this jelly. Drum roll please: $1.50. But, that's only because I had to go out and buy more jars. If not for that, it would have been $0.50 a jar. Even at $1.50, though, it beats the grocery store prices. Now, if I can just find somebody with free raspberries, I'll be all set.

Localvore

You've heard of the Localvore movement, I'm sure. It's becoming all the rage around here. We've had several articles in the local newspaper this summer regarding different people attempting different variations of the Localvore idea. I'm neither the cook nor the grocery shopper for my household, so I don't really worry about it. But, I'm feeling very Localvore lately. This past weekend, I made crab apple jelly. I love crab apple jelly. I hadn't had any for years and then a couple years ago I found an orchard with one crab apple tree. So, I made jelly. This year, we ran out of jelly and decided we had to make more. Except, those crab apples are expensive. Then we realized that the tree we walk by several times a week is a crab apple tree. And it was loaded with crab apples. Big, beautiful, red, crab apples. Free crap apples as it turns out, because the folks who own the property gave us permission to pick as many apples as we wanted. And that's exactly what we did.

We picked apples. (No, that's not me in the picture.)

Then we brought the apples home and washed them.


We removed the stems and quartered them, but we did not core them. We added some water, put them in a big pot, and boiled them to mush.


We mashed up the mush, strained it through cheesecloth, and measured out the juice.


We added sugar to the juice, poured it into a different pot and boiled it again. Once it reached a rolling boil, we added the liquid pectin, and let it boil for a couple more minutes.


We removed it from the stove, and scooped off the foam.


I let my mother pour it into the jars, because she is an expert jelly pourer and I totally suck at it.


We scooped off some more foam from each jar. We may not be taking it to the fair, but we want pretty jelly.


Because not all our jars are honest to goodness jelly jars (we're cheap and like to reuse store bought jelly jars. and pickle jars. and olive jars. and just about any kind of glass jar with a screw top lid), we have to seal some of them with wax. I let mom pour the wax, too, because she's so good at pouring. (Don't you just love my homemade loop loom potholders?)




And we now have lots of jars of beautiful, yummy crap apple jelly. If you're a good friend of mine, you're likely to get a jar at some point in the near future. If you're not a good friend, it sucks to be you. Perhaps your local grocery store will sell you some crap apple jelly, unfortunately, it won't be as good as mine.




And it's a good thing we didn't plan to take any to the fair, because one of the lids fell on the floor and was used even though it wasn't sterile any more. There may also have been a dog hair in one jar, but I think I managed to scoop it out. Everything tastes better with dog hair, though, so no worries.

If you're not a good friend of mine, but you do receive a jar of crap apple jelly, you might want to inspect it carefully. We've gotta do something with those imperfect jars.

For those interested, we calculated the cost of our jelly to be about $0.66 per jar. That's sixty-six cents people. There's still a whole tree full of crab apples. I should be selling this stuff; I could make tons of money. Home made jelly always sells for a premium. I might be able to charge a little more, or at least get more traffic by pointing out the oh-so-local aspect of this jelly. Of course, my costs might go up if I was selling it. I'd have to buy all pretty jars that could be properly sealed instead of pickle jars with wax. Still, though, I could make a definite profit on this stuff.