Fruit season is on

Fruit season is ON which means lots of fruit to eat and lots of jam to make.

Cherry Plums

Sofia helping pick the cherry plums

 

Cherry plums are not that great to eat but they do make yummy jam (as we discovered last year) so just over two kilos when into a batch of jam, two kilos went to our friend Helen and we have a kilo in the freezer too, not sure what will become of them yet.

Sofia helping again...

There was a little mishap in between tree and pot - Sofia was helping out and managed to spill the large bowl of cherry plums on the kitchen floor. I am wondering how many cherry plums might have rolled under the fridge!

Apricots

Last year we only had five apricots from our tree - apparently this was either something to do with a late frost or too much rain at the wrong time of the growing season. This year we didn't have any late frosts and it's ages since we've had any proper rain so we had over a hundred apricots on the tree - even after Sofia's regular sampling as the fruit was ripening.

There are about ten gazillion recipes on the web and at least half of them are jam recipes. Ian adapted "the best apricot jam recipe" from Little Green Cottage, but as he says, really jam recipes are really pretty simple - chop up your fruit, add in all the sugar in the house then boil it until it's nice and sticky. The recipe used the weight of fruit before preparation, but a lot of our fruit developed brown soft spots and needed bits chopped out so the recipe needed some adjustments. So we used 2kg of chopped fruit with 1.8kg of sugar and 4 tablespoons of lemon. Ian misread the recipe and added half a litre of water but it worked out well. The quantities varied but the method was copied from the recipe above. We also added in some apricot kernels too as they are yummy.

Chopping out the bugs and gooey bits

I also made an apricot upside down cake - yum!

The apricots ripened very quickly and a lot of them went brown and mushy before we could get to them which may have been related to the heat. It was much more successful than last year but we'll try to do even better next year.

The mulberry tree

One thing we discovered last year is that the birds leave us more than enough fruit to eat, except for the cherries and mulberries. So we netted the cherries this year (possibly a bit late) and we collected a good size bowl.

The mulberry tree was pruned with netting in mind but still presented a bit more of a challenge due to its size and rough branches. This did not deter Ian and he "stitched" together a couple of large nets then weighed the bottom down with bricks after we had a few blackbird intruders. Netting has had the added benefit that it has saved the car and everything else from being covered in mulberry coloured bird poo. That is Ian's head poking out of the top middle of the tree.

There is heaps of luscious fruit, you have to go inside the net and tree canopy to get at it. I have been visiting most days to do a little hand to mouth picking - so sweet! It reminds me of my childhood when we used to pick mulberries from a family tree at Yallingup so my Grandma could make jam and mulberry tart. I have managed to stop gorging long enough to pick a little to use, but have frozen the fruit until inspiration strikes. I may have to honour Grandma's memory and make a tart.

The harvest commences

Fruit season started in late November and goes on for the next five months or so. At first it was just the red currants but now there are a few types of berries and also the cherries are getting close.

 

 

Last weekend we picked just over a kilo of red currants (another kilo went to our friend Helen the weekend before) and so red currant jelly was on the agenda. After perusing a few recipes online and checking out Stephanie it looked fairly straight forward - add an equal amount of sugar to currants, boil, strain and pour into some jars.

The interesting bit was that it took a long time to strain through the muslin and I got worried about it setting in the bowl, so I poured off two jars of clear syrup and then squeezed the muslin to get the rest out. I knew that squeezing the fruit would most likely produce a cloudy jelly, but I figured it didn't matter too much. What I didn't count on was that the first couple of jars barely set and the subsequent ones got progressively stiffer. I am guessing the later jars had more pectin from the currant pips, but a little unexpected nonetheless.

Using our preserves

One of the things that we tried to consider when preserving the summer bounty from the garden was how the end product would be used - no point making a whole lot of something if it just sat in the cupboard.

This post is just to comment on some of the hits and misses.

• The dried plums and pears were a big hit, we have run out of both and will definitely do more next season
• The various jams (cherry plum, berry, crabapple) are all delicious and while we don't eat a lot of jam ourselves, they have been easy to give away. Plus having yummy jam means that I have been forced to try scone making and revisit pikelets (both being good jam and cream vehicles)
• In comparison, the plum sauce, while very tasty has been languishing

The large quantity of quince paste sitting in the bottom of the fridge had been bugging me until recently. You can eat the paste with cheese or use it as a glaze, but we weren't really getting through it.  Then I was flicking through a recently acquired cookbook (I like Heidi's blog a lot so thought I would buy her book) when a recipe for membrillo cake caught my eye. The cake uses 225g of paste - a bit of an extravagance if you are paying Maggie Beer for her paste, but ideal for me with our glut in the fridge.

The cake turned out quite well.

I didn't have the recommended size tin and used a smaller one which resulted in a thicker cake so the edge was a bit overdone and dry before the middle was cooked. Also, the cubes of paste in the cake were not very evenly distributed (I was worried they would break up when I mixed it) so some pieces of cake had lots while others were lacking. Overall it was still pretty yummy - I think I will have to make it again with a few tweaks (maybe some yoghurt in the mix and definitely a shallower profile).  The recipe is available online here.

Fruit calendar

The fruit seemed to last forever last summer. There was so much fruit we never bothered to note when each fruit started and finished - and we didn't get here until mid-December when things were already under way. To help us plan for this summer we've put together this rough calendar. For the fruits where we did some preserving we know the dates from the photos but it's mostly based on memory so it's pretty rough. Importantly, we can see that Sofia has a pretty constant supply of some kind of fruit to pick and eat from December to May.

Fruit season and preserving day for 2012 season

Of course timing might be different this season and some of the trees have been pruned pretty hard over the winter so may not fruit much at all this year. We're planning to keep much better notes this year so we know what to expect in the future.

Quinces and crabapples

Ian had five days off over Easter (a lot of Tasmanian companies have Tuesday as a holiday as well), so we took the opportunity to do a bit more preserving.

The quinces have been ripe for a while, but I had been lacking a bit in motivation as they can be quite hard work (especially as they looked like they were going to be buggy).  Ian volunteered to pick the fruit and also cut them up - he is becoming quite the de-bug expert.  They ended up being surprisingly bug-free, but a lot of them had flesh that showed a brown discolouration so we discarded quite a large percentage of the fruit we had picked.  Googling after the fact came up with a theory that the discolouration may be caused by too many fruit overloading the tree.  This would make sense as the tree had a huge amount of fruit and has been neglected for a while (like most in this garden).

I decided to make quince paste as it lasts well, is delicious with cheese and can also be used as a glaze. A few of Christmas' ago, I glazed the ham with quince paste. Yum!

I used the recipe in my trusty Stephanie.  You have to cook the paste for ages, but it turned out well and is a beautiful "quincy" colour.

The crabapples were also ready to pick.  They were so pretty on the tree.

This jelly was easy to make, after cooking the apples whole you strain the liquid through muslin (I strained it overnight), then add your sugar and cook until it reaches the setting point.  Crabapples are high in pectin, so it doesn't take too long for the jelly to be ready.  Again, the colour of the results was very beautiful.  Unfortunately there are a lot of tiny air bubbles in my jelly.  Not something that will affect the taste, but it means the jelly isn't as clear as it could be.  It is a fairly common problem and can apparently be circumvented by adding a small amount of butter when you add the sugar. A tip for next time.

1.5 kg of fruit yielded just under 4 x 250ml jars.

Spare Pears

The pear harvest

We picked most of our pears from the big pear tree in the back corner of the yard yesterday. We've tried a few and they're pretty yummy - Sofia is loving them. It is about 15kg worth of pears with not too many bugs in the fruit compared to the apple trees (which look a bit grim). They're not all completely ripe yet but apparently pears keep ripening once they are picked.

Unfortunately because the garden was neglected for a while, including while the fruit was forming on the trees, there is quite a codling moth problem in the apples, pears and quinces which we need to work on for next season. Apparently having chickens running around the garden is a good way to control codling moth - just another reason to get some chooks soon.

There's no way we were going to eat all of the pears so we decided to try drying some of them. That meant peeling them.

No shortage of pears to peel and slice

 Getting rid of all the buggy bits and the cores.

Some were better than others

Then slicing them and pre-treating them in a mixture of water and lemon juice to stop them from oxidising and going brown.

Sliced pears in water and lemon juice plus the scraps

Then we stuck them in the dryer for at least eight hours...

In the dryer at the start. I love the way they look like chips

Nine hours later they were ready to be stored away for later consumption. As you can see, the pre-treatment didn't really stop them from going brown so next time we might go a bit harder on the lemon juice or just cheat and buy some ascorbic acid.

After nine hours in the dryer. Ready to go

The finished product (there is another jar too).

The first jar

A lot of work for two jars of dried pears but they are seriously yummy.

Whateverberry jam

Our yard is full of berries. Apart from the raspberries outside our back door, they mostly look self-sown and we have no idea what some of them are. Picking and eating them is just another part of the adventure that is our yard - some of them taste like sweet rosewater, some of them are face-puckering. They include raspberries, boysenberries and loganberries. Over the summer we picked them whenever they were ripe and if we didn't eat them all then we froze them. Loganberries are not very sweet so they are better for cooking or turning into jam and mostly got frozen. We never really knew what we were picking though.

The berries from our garden thawing

We also have a mulberry tree (yay!). Between the birds and the wind, not many ripe mulberries made it into human hands.  The ones that did were huge and delicious and were gobbled immediately, thus not making it into the freezer for the jam.

mulberry

Apart from the berries from our garden we also went picking blackberries near New Norfolk, and our neighbour Hilary gave us some blackberries she had picked too. It was around 3kg of very yummy fruit just waiting to be jammed.

Jam Recipe
1050g random berries from our garden
600g blackberries picked by our neighbour, Hilary, on her walk last week
1200g blackberries picked by us near New Norfolk on the weekend
bucket load of sugar (equal weight to the fruit)
plus lemon juice or crab apples (for pectin)

Then do the jam thing - boil, add sugar, boil some more until it is ready to set.

After adding the sugar.

We made one batch using lemon juice to set the jam and then another using crab apple. We have a crab apple tree and the fruit is notoriously high in pectin.  In fact you can make a pectin stock with them. Instead of using stock we just cut a few (unripe) crab apples in half, wrapped them in some muslin and added them to the pot with the berries.  Both jams set well, but the crab apple assisted one came together much more quickly.

The goodies
7 x 300ml jars
8 x 230ml jars

Some of the loot cooling down

The jam is very yummy and there was heaps of it. We have added it to the the cupboard with the cherry plum jam we made earlier and a few odd leftovers from previous years. 

With relish

Our buddies, Helen and John procured these beauties on a recent tomato hunting mission to Brighton. (That same day we checked out the MONA Market - worth a look if you are in the area, the weather is nice and you feel like sitting around soaking up the vibe with a cool beverage.)

While Helen preserved theirs, I decided to make tomato relish.  I will always remember the surprise when I learned that my Grandma's legendary tomato relish recipe was virtually the same as CWA's Tomato Relish (No. 2).  Either way, it is tried, true and tasty.  Cheesy toast is not the same without it.

Your mother was a hamster

... and your father smelt of elderberries (French Solider, Monty Python and The Holy Grail 1974)

I have been drinking elderflower cordial ever since my mate Michelle converted me three or four years ago and was pleased when we were still living in Melbourne to discover a Tassie version.  I recently noticed that Ashbolt were also making elderberry products and managed to taste some at a visit to the local farmers' market.

It was pretty exciting to discover that our new garden had a number of elder trees (or more correctly some in our garden, some hanging over the fence).  I missed the boat with the flowers this year, but recently Ian, Sofia and I picked half a bucket full of berries ...

... and I made elderberry syrup using David Lebovitz's recipe.  I ended up straining the liquid through cheese cloth as my sieve was not fine enough to get all the bits out.  The colour of the syrup is intense (even when diluted to drink) and the taste is quite subtle.  Great with fizzy water and a squeeze of lemon, the syrup is also meant to be quite good for you.

You wouldn't see this shot on those glamour blogs

Plums

We have a couple of plum trees in the garden, the first to ripen were the dark purple ones - not sure what type they are (possibly damson?).

The big tree was literally dripping with fruit so we had to figure out the best way to use them.  Ian suggested we get a dehydrator and after searching around I decided I would like a Fowlers one.  The Fowlers dehydrator has variable temperature and you can add in extra trays plus Fowlers is Australian and has been in the preserving business for a long time.  I checked ebay and had a couple of units on my watchlist, but I ended up with a new one after going into the local Mitre 10 and finding them on sale.  Not only did K&D have them on sale, but they had huge signs proclaiming "Summer time is preserving time!".

So we made prunes.  I just did a couple of trays for the first try and this photo shows them after they had been drying for about 20 hours (they were more densely spaced, but I forgot to take a photo before starting to eat unload them).

Sofia loves them.

We also made plum sauce using another of Sally Wise's recipes.  It is a delicious way to use the fruit and turns out a very deep beautiful colour.

The other tree's fruit is starting to ripen now.  We have been told by a couple of people that it is a Greengage plum which is apparently one of the best plums for eating.

Cherry plums and chamomile

One of the appeals of this property was the big block (2300 sqm) with established fruit trees and other fruity delights.  Ian has been working hard to get a handle on the overgrowth and we have both been turning our attention to what can be done with the produce.

My initial forays into preserving some of the garden bounty have been with mixed success.
Firstly I wanted to find something to do with the abundant cherry plums available in our back yard (the trees are technically in our neighbours' yards, but they hang over our back fence).

After looking around for recipes I came across Sally Wise's blog and an entry devoted to cherry plums.  Sally is a local and appears to be a preserving guru.  So I gave the jam a bash and the results were great, a little tart as promised and the high-pectin fruit meant it set really easily.  The colour was the biggest surprise - it looks almost artificial in its intensity.  I am planning to try the cordial recipe as well.

I was also keen to make use of the chamomile that had gone nuts in the abandoned vegie patch.  I figured it would be good dried for tea.  It seemed to be the common advice to use only the flowers, no leaves or stems.  Ian and I harvested a quantity of the flowers, dried them on trays and I spent a number of evenings snipping the stems close to the individual flower heads.  Unfortunately, the resultant tea was very bitter (sorry to my guinea pigs Susie and Liz) . I am not sure why it turned out so unpalatable, but I do not think I will go to the effort again.