This Is My Jam

Wow, it feels like forever since I've been active on this blog. At the moment I'm at one of those pivotal, lifechanging moments in my life, and I think today is the first day I've really had any time to sit down and appreciate the marvellous chaos I'm currently a part of. I'm not too certain on details yet, but regardless of what is happening, this small-town barmaid is a small-town barmaid no more. Things are getting really exciting, and I feel like over the past week I've visited almost all of the south of the country. Still, for the moment I'm back home, and tending my little garden, in which the ripe and unripe tomatoes look like little traffic light dots, and the runner beans are trying to climb the washing line; and I'm feeling good.

I haven't been cooking so much recently, but before this frenzy there came a rut, in which all I did was huddle over the stove, swearing to myself and stirring a la the opening witchy scenes of Macbeth. It wasn't a predicting the future kind of thing, mind, it was a mechanism via which to stay sane in the present. I even got myself back into preserving. Now, since this is what I'll call backlog blogging, I can't say you'll find the ingredients with any relative ease at this time of year; but this is as much a diary for me as a suggestion to my readers, so I'll call this a kind of posterity post.

In keeping with my last post about raspberry and elderflower cupcakes, in early September I was still finding a whole bunch of excellent Summer produce, in glut-sized proportion, for silly money. Again, today, we're talking berries, but this time, the perennial English favourite, the strawberry. Now, wimbledon is over, so I had no problem eating a whole bunch of them with cream, because I wasn't being told to by advertisers everywhere; but I did buy 2kg of the things (they were so cute...I had to), so I needed a more sensible solution to what to do with them.

I decided on the most English of preserves: Strawberry jam. It makes you think of red and white gingham and scones just saying it, huh? I'm not really a gingham kind of girl, but I might fancy playing at being one on any given day, so a few jars of homemade strawberry jam in the cupboard for when the mood strikes me seems like a good idea. Although I'm sure you'll believe me more if I say I've mostly been piling it on toast to accompany a black coffee or seven of a morning.

So anyway, who do you turn to in the case of preserves? Who else but my jarring, bottling, and infusing guru, Pam Corbin? No one else. Obviously. I have nothing but love for her simple, friendly approach to preserving, and sort of want her to adopt me so I can go live with her and preserve all day and sew cool aprons for us to wear all night. So, without further ado, here is my very picture heavy approach to strawberry jam, taken from her River Cottage Preserves Handbook:

Strawberry Jam

makes 4-5 340g jars

1kg strawberries, hulled, larger ones halved or quartered
500g granulated sugar
450g jam sugar (it's labelled as such and has added pectin which helps the set)
150ml lemon juice

Put 200g of the strawberries into a preserving pan with 200g of the granulated sugar. Crush to a pulp with a potato masher. At which point it will look like this:


Place the pan on a gentle heat and, when the fruit mixture is warm, add the rest of the strawberries. Very gently bring to a simmering point, agitating the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to prevent the fruit from sticking. Simmer for 5 minutes to allow the strawberries to soften just a little. At which point it will look like this:


Add the remaining granulated sugar and the jam sugar. Stir gently to prevent the sugar sticking and burning on the bottom of the pan. When the sugar has dissolved, add the lemon juice. It'll look a bit like this:

Increase the heat and, when the mixture reaches a full boil, boil rapidly for 8-9 minutes. Then test for setting point. (I do this by dropping some onto a cold saucer and poking it with a finger to see if it puckers; if it puckers it's ready). Mine looked like this at setting point:


Remove from the heat and, if the surface is scummy, stir gently to disperse. Pot and seal. Use within 12 months.

So that's strawberry jam. i forgot to take4 pictures of the potted and sealed jam because I am something of an airhead, but you get the idea. I only got two jars, because one of them was disproportionately large (previously containing mayonnaise. Whoever tells you you can't recycle jars for preserving is probaboly in the glass industry, because I'm telling you now that you can, and you should if you give two fucks about the environment)

My jam was really nice; I have been eating it on toast for breakfast every morning I've woken up in my own bed (and there are pluses and minuses to this scenario: the strawberry jam on toast being one of the pluses). I am not really a strawberry jam aficionado; since when I was little, which seems to be the halcyon jam eating days in most people's lives, my heart belonged solely to apricot, but this is definitely better than the shop-bought stuff by a mile. The only problem with my jam was that the fruit seemed to float to the top of the jars, which according to Pam means I didn't take quite enough care dissolving the sugar before bringing the mixture to the slightly scary high-speed boil it needs before it becomes jam. It would seem I still have a way to go before I can be her preserving/apron-making apprentice extraordinaire, but in the meantime I have the wherewithal, should i want to, to make scones and victoria sponges all winter long. And who doesn't want to do that?

I'm Somewhere Inbetween

So you know how I made all that fuss at the beginning of summer about how I was going to miss slow cooking and afternoons in the kitchen and big bold winter dishes? Well, summer is drawing to a close and I'm finding myself not quite ready to give up on delicate, barely-cooked food picked straight from the garden. I find there's just no pleasing some people. More often than not, I find I'm one of them. I come most alive during periods of transition; when there's the promise of new challenges and scenarios but the old ones are still, comfortingly, in play. I don't so much like change, as the possibility of it; I've always been obsessed with potential. I guess that's why I'm currently happier in my kitchen than anywhere else. The hedgerows are starting to come alive, and I'm picking damsons and blackberries almost everywhere I walk in the villages, but I've still got tomatoes and courgettes and beans ripening in the garden. Autumn is coming but it's very easy to keep Summer alive.

The shops, at the moment, seem to be aiding and abetting my pleasure in indecision. The erratic Summer we've had seems to be affecting not just my garden, but the country as a whole. Some of the best 'summer' produce I've bought has been in the last week or so: late varieties of every type of berry and currant you could conceivably imagine; stunning courgettes and beans; all cheap, plentiful, and wonderful. So i can't help it if my mind is somewhere in July, can I? My surroundings are conspiring to help me.

Now, most of the aforementioned berries and currants were eaten raw, or made into simple compotes and eaten over yoghurt at what I, the nocturnal barmaid, have the gall to call breakfast time. But when you're buying perishables in glut-size lots, you have to vary up how you eat them pretty quickly or you're going to end up wasting them, or getting bored shitless with them, or both. So, when faced with the third perfect little punnet of raspberries after days and days of raw raspberries and yoghurt, I knew I had to make them into something that I would, and more importantly, a lot of other people would help, eat. And quickly.

Now I'm not sure about anyone else round here, but when it's a question of food and mass appeal, the answer, to my mind, is pretty much always cake. Everyone likes cake. Well, this is not strictly true, but everyone I've ever met who has professed to not like cake has been so wilfully miserable and stubborn that I've not kept them around very long. So, to put it another way; all of my friends like cake. If I make it, they will eat it. So I grabbed my punnet of raspberries and got myself flicking through Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache, and found the perfect 'I'm not letting go of Summer and you can't make me' recipe:

Raspberry and Elderflower Cupcakes

2 medium free-range eggs
140g caster sugar
200g topped, tailed, peeled, and finely grated courgette
3 tbsp elderflower cordial (sadly, not home made as I missed the elderflowers this year, but I had this knocking around from making pitchers of lovely Plymouth Lemonade to get drunk on)
80g white rice flour (I used plain, you're allowed to substitute it)
120g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt (I omitted this; I don't often salt cakes unless they're chocolate)
120g fresh raspberries plus 12 extra ones for the tops

For the icing:

140g icing sugar
3 tbsp elderflower cordial

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c/gas mark 4 and line a muffin tray with paper cases (note, I found this recipe created 18 cakes, so I lined an extra six hole tray).

Whisk the eggs and sugar in a large mixing bowl for 5 minutes, until pale and quadrupled in volume.

Add the grated courgette and the elderflower cordial, and whisk again. Mix in the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and salt until they are well introduced. Gently fold in the raspberries, taking care not to crush them up too much.

Spoon the mixture into cupcake cases, and place in the oven for 25 minutes until risen and cooked. Don't be alarmed that they are flat on the top rather than dome shaped. This is perfectly normal.

Cool the cupcakes for 15 minutes while you make the icing. Sieve the icing sugar into a small mixing bowl. Add the elderflower cordial and mix until it forms a loose white icing. Add colouring if you want to use it.

Ice each cake individually and top with a raspberry.

And here are mine:


Cute little things, aren't they? I have to admit that even as a 23 year old girl I still get just a tiny bit delighted when things I make look like illustrations from children's books. It reminds me of the time when in Brownies I had to host a tea party to get my hostess badge (you're damn right I've got a badge in hostessing; I got one at Guides too), so I went through a load of kid's books, being a kid at the time, along with my mum's Beginner's cookbook from the seventies, in order to work out what a tea party looked like and involved. I remember being very impressed when the cakes I'd made looked like the ones in a picture from a book about kittens having tea. I dare say these little things wouldn't have looked out of place on the kittens' pastel tea party table, either, so I am just as pleased with myself this time.

Still, a busy girl like me uses her hostess badge skills behind a bar these days, so I don't have time for tea parties. Instead I took a whole bunch of the cakes to work to give to my coworkers, who received them with pleasure. they were marvellous tasting little things, and i enjoyed the cook's share of them before work (and after work), with a pot of rose infused tea. But I didn't go so far as trying to share it with my cats. Village life hasn't got to me that badly yet.