Saturday Surprise — Fruits of my labors

September 19, 2020

You all know I like to cook, and I’ve talked about being more aware of food wastage during this pandemic, which has resulted in some fun new dishes…as well as a few failures.

I planted fruit trees in hopes that one day I’d have enough fruit to bake with, freeze, and make jam. Out of my apple tree, 2 apricot trees, 2 pear trees, one peach tree and one plum tree…ONLY the largest pear tree got any blooms. In the past I’ve blamed it on the weather. But something weird is going on, in that I’ve NEVER had blooms on my apricot trees after 4-5 years. When I bought them I made sure with the nursery expert that they were cross pollinators, as my (limited) understanding is there are no varieties of apricot trees for our climate that are considered self-pollinators–I don’t think that’s the proper term. But I know that my plum tree, which did produce plums one year, is the variety that doesn’t need another plum. Same with the apple tree and the peach tree, both of which have had blooms and produced one or two pieces of small fruit. But nothing the past two years.

My surviving pear tree has like 20 pears that survived this year which is 20 more than last year. It’s a little disheartening because the apricot trees are getting bigger, but to be honest, I bought them for the fruit, not because the trees themselves are pretty. We don’t use pesticides on our lawn, or fertilizers so I don’t think it’s a chemical type issue that’s keeping the insects and birds away and zero pollination for several years running. If anyone has experience with this happening with their fruit trees and has suggestions…I’m all ears.

So this leads me to the fruit aisle of the grocery story or a farmer’s market to get my fruit fixes. When we were in Denver, I bought a good-sized bag of Colorado red plums. Last weekend they were ripe enough to experiment with. I also had some dark purple grapes to throw in the mix for my jam session 🙂

This is the grape plum jam (see how red the plums are?) I’m a jam person, not a jelly person, so I was perfectly happy to halve the grapes and toss them in the pot.

It didn’t make much jam, and I opted not to do a hot bath, instead I just put the jars in the fridge. Since I’d just baked 3 loaves of bread, I knew it wouldn’t last long.

Look at the gorgeous purple color!

I still had half a bag of plums, grapes and blueberries, so I tossed them together, along with some of the hatch chiles we’d also purchased in Denver. I was very careful not to put many of them in (about 5 sliced rings total) because they might’ve been the hottest peppers I’ve ever had! But I’m all about doing weird experimentation, so this is what the batch looked like after mixing:

Now this turned out really, really good–the perfect balance of sweet and heat so I did do the hot water bath for ten minutes. Kinda sad it only made 2 jars…

In addition to buying plums and chiles in Denver, I also tracked down Colorado peaches. Some of them were still pretty green so I put them in a box with a few ripe tomatoes, mangos, and the leftover plums. They were ripe enough to work with yesterday. And since I love mango flavored anything, I opted to make peach mango jam.

I pureed the mangos with my immersion blender. Ripe mangos are super juicy and I worried a bit it’d take longer for the liquid to boil down. Which it did. I made 2 batches at one time, as I’d read numerous suggestions of not doubling a recipe. And it wasn’t any more work to have 2 batches going at one time.

Honestly, this pairing is DIVINE. Like…so freakin’ tasty. The jam looked a little runny even after I’d cooked it down for 3 hours, and I’d hoped after the hot bath treatment it would’ve jelled a little more. I examined the jars this morning and they still look a bit…sloppy. It won’t affect the taste, but when I finish up the mangos and peaches later today, I might have to use pectin. I’m not crazy about pectin in jam, part of the reason I wanted to make my own was to keep it natural. I did skimp a little on the sugar for this mix of fruit (about 1 3/4 cups instead of 2- 2 1/2) because both the mangos and the peaches were very ripe and I didn’t want the jam too sweet. Here’s the finished jars:

Since we’ve got SO MANY HATCH CHILES (seriously, Mr. James bought 2 bushels of roasted chiles!) I am going to throw some chiles in this batch to see what happens. Wish me luck.

For those of you who are interested, this is the recipe I’ve been using for all of the jams, regardless of the type of fruit:

5 cups of cut fruit (for the mango peach jam, I used 2 cups pureed mango, 3 cups of peaches)

2 – 2 1/2 cups of sugar depending on ripeness of fruit and personal sweetness preference

1/2 teaspoon salt

juice from half a lime or lemon 

Bring to a hard boil for one minute. Then turn down so a medium-low simmer. Stir. The fruit will foam so just stir it down. Some people add butter. Eh. I just stir.

I’ve found 3 hours of cook time to be a good gauge. You don’t have to stand there stirring constantly. But it is better to err on the side of a lower cooking temp than a higher so as to not burn the sugar. Also,  If you want the fruit less chunky, just smash it with a spoon after it’s cooked for about an hour. I found the grapes really macerated well, as did the plums.

Pour hot mix into hot sterilized jars, seal, and submerge in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Remove and let cool. Then, you have this:

If you’ve got a favorite jam recipe, share it!

Have a great weekend, everybody!

XOXO

L~

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