Let the jam making season BEGIN!

I'm going to need a larger storage area for all the jams I'm making this year.  I hope everyone is practising their 'happily surprised' faves for opening their Christmas presents this year- as everyone's getting jam!

Last week I decided to make the most of the squillions of Rose Hips locally and try turning them into jam.

Baby Wild has a wee cold, so my intentions started out good with the idea to make her some Vit C packed Rose Hip Syrup.  I love this Ministry of Food release recipe during WW2 to encourage people to make their own medicine, and was going to use it as a basis for my recipe.

But then I read somewhere (maybe on the Cottage Smallholder?) that the syrup is best made after the first frost, and so until then jam is a splendid idea.   So I made jam with my pickings.  And it is DIVINE!

I topped & tailed the hips, boiled them up so soften them, mashed them up in the pot and then left them to drip slowly overnight through a double muslin lined sieve into a bowl.  Then I boiled up the resulting orange liquid with some pectin laced sugar and jarred it up.

Pretty eh!  Too pretty for my local flower show who turned their noses up at it!  I am planning on making more this week, and will tweak the recipe a bit.  Next time I'll chop up the hips first so that they don't need to be boiled so long as I bet this ruins the Vit C content.  I ended up with about 430ml hip liquid & only added 200g pectin sugar and it's definitely sweet enough at this ratio.

I had no idea jam making was so easy, and now there's jam everywhere!  I'll never loose the baby pounds at this rate, especially now that my local Tesco has finally started selling Sourdough bread. Thank god it's too expensive to be bought regularly.

PS check out these amazing sounding vegetable jam recipes from HFW via The Guardian! Oh YUM! I'm away to pull up some carrots already.....

WOW Wild Rose Jam

Get your shoes on, grab a bag and hit the hedges - the wild roses are in full bloom and my but they taste fine!  A great way to pass half an hour with a toddler too, I may add, who loves the permission to pick flowers for once.  I know it's a bit early to be thinking about Christmas, but I am making this jam in batches and hiding the jars from myself so that I can give them as gifts in the depths of winter as the runny jam is pure summer in a jar.  I can't wait to open it when summer seems a far too distant memory in the dark and wet Scottish winter.

Making the jam couldn't be simpler - I used this recipe here, as posted in an earlier post.  The smell of the petals is almost overwhelming, a little reminiscent of a sweet granny in fact!  I spent a very happy 20 minutes sitting in the sun checking my huge bag of petals for bugs and separating them. 

 I've kept the white petals I collected to make rose water (see photo below) as I want a clear liquid so it's safe to spray around the house.  Then I used only the beautiful pink petals for the jam.  I didn't cut off the white bits at the base as this would be too much hassle and it hasn't made a bit of difference I can assure you.

I couldn't resist keeping some petals to dry in the sun and store in a jar to preserve the scent

So get out there and fill a bag whilst the sun is shining and the flowers are adorning pathways and roadsides.  Be careful to dodge the bees that are also having similar thoughts and enthusiasm!

Today we shall be collecting elderflower and (oh my favourite flower ever!) meadowsweet blossom and rushing them home to make cordial before they wilt.