Sunday, December 28, 2008

...and the fruit of our labours

This evening we converged upon the apricot tree and spent an hour stripping it pretty much bare.It was quite fun. I haven't picked apricots since I was a young thing living in Christchurch (where it was my job to climb to the top of the tree we had at the back of our yard and pick the ones the grown-ups couldn't reach with their ladders and rakes) I think that was the same summer I was being paid paltry amounts of money to pick raspberries at a farm up the road a way. Realising what we were picking to go into the jam (blue fluffy berries) put me off raspberry jam for quite some years...No blue fluff tonight. Just buckets and buckets of apricoty goodnessplus a few that got sidetracked mouth-wards on the way to the buckets!

Coming up tomorrow: The Shopping Sherpa's first attempt at jam making. Stay tuned...

3 comments :

Janet McKinney said...

Hello

Have fun with your jam making episode. It is fun, and not too hard. I have made thousands of bottles of jam (used to do more than 100 bottles a year in New Zealand) - and so if you need some input - please ask.

The other ingredient (besides sugar) you are going to need is lemons - and I know a source wheich is groaning - literally - with lemons. can I help you with these?

Janet

AMCSviatko said...

Lemons, huh? No one mentioned them (or is that just another way of providing this magic Pectin stuff I've heard of?)

Lemons would be nice for other uses and reminds me of a suggestion I was going to make to Everyday Eco: creating some sort of register of people with fruit trees that they're not going to use so they can be matched up with people who are happy to magically turn the fruit into stuff and return some of it as a thank you...

(Gawd, if I take this train of thought any further I'll be suggesting we all join LETs!)

Cherry ・ チェリー ・ 체리  said...

Ahhh! there's the apricot blog! Eye candy.
Fruit picking