When I am not designing and making beautiful dichroic glass jewellery, working at my Monday to Thursday job, working for my partner Sue of Inspired by Script or catching up with all the odd jobs that needs doing around our home and garden. I occasionally try something that I have never tried before.
This week I had a few hours spare so decided to do something with all the Elderberries that we collected over the last couple of seasons.
This first pictures shows the small amount collected from a previous year in the bag and the bowl carries the next years collection.
After de-stalking the berries they were put in the freezer until I had time to do something with them. The choice was Wine or Jam and as Sue doesn't like red wine I decided on the jam option.
Well that was last year and this week was the week to get boiling.
The next picture shows straining the boiled berries, I expected a little more than this but free jam is, free jam!
Here you can see the hanging set up. The straining sheet had string attached to each corner and then hung from a long piece of string from handy hook in the ceiling.
(where there is a will, there is a way).
The same amount of suger with pectin was added with a little lemon juice and brought to the boil, and kept vigorously boiling for about 20 minutes. You can see this short video on the following link.
Whilst the jam was boiling, I sterilised a few jars, more than I needed but I did not want jam left over with nowhere to put it.
Here is the final product, about 1kg in total.
Nicely set as well.
One thing I didn't know was the smell of Elderberry jam, whilst being made and when finished. It's a very peculiar smell, lets hope it tastes better than it smells. LOL.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this little diversion to my normal blog post. I will be posting other daft stuff in the future, I might post about the fully insulated box for our local stray cat I made for the garden or the multi coloured garden shed or whatever I have not even thought about yet.
Only time will tell!
Steve
