Mr. Marvell and his Jam

This last year the jam supplies have just about come out even. Once again I have tackled the lemons late, and once again I swear I will make lemon marmalade earlier next year. This year there is added force to the vow because I have come to understand that there is less pectin and more bitter in the lemons in May than there is in March.  The marmalade works fine though.

This year I am making very small batches more often. It sounds like it would be more work, but I think it is less nerve-wracking and does less bad things to the kitchen and my life. Also it means I can use the smaller amounts of fruit that drop into my lap for no reason. Like: the Grey Bears bag usually has one of those enormous boxes of strawberries which disappear in seconds if you have childen but are more challenging if you are a single old lady who doesn't eat cereal or ice cream. This is four cups of uncut berries or three of cut. Meanwhile, my rhubarb -- which I planted for the nice fellow as I don't care for it much (or mind it, really) is producing a small and steady amount of stalks which I dutifully pull, trim, and stick in the feezer bag I have dedicated to them. So today I made a small batch of jam: three cups of strawberries, one of rhubarb, and most of a lemon (for pectin, mainly). Most of my jam is running just over three quarters of a cup of sugar to a cup of fruit, but the rhubarb and the lemon are something to contend with, so I did it with four cups. And it came out very nice, with four half-pint jars and a bit less than a cup to put into a bowl for immediate snacking.

So the tally so far: 4 jars meyer lemon peel and blood orange marmalade, and four jars of strawberry-rhubarb-lemon jam. I'll make another two or three different batches of lemon marmalade, and probably more berry jam next week, depending on what the Grey Bears bag has in it. Since I liked the rhubarb with the berries, I may also do a batch of rhubarb by itself (or rather with candied orange peel I have from Christmas time). And I may also stick a box of berries in the freezer to wait for the next batch and make an all-berry jam.

I like feeling free to experiment with combinations with these small batches. If you're only going to lose four jars at most, it's a lot less intimidating than losing a flat's worth of fruit. Not buying flats anyway. My rule for a while has been: jam is made with fruit I grow, forage, or get as a gift. On that note, I'm tantalized by the pruple leaf plum around the corner. It's dropping its fruit, but the tree has gotten large and the plums smash on the pavement. I suppose I could go after it with the pole picker, but that entails geting over my shyness to ask the neighbors if I can go in their yard, and I don't know how many I'll get anyway, as it's not a heavy bearer and it is freakishly tall.

Also around the corner, at the house that used to be the high water house, there's a low fence with two kinds of passion vine on it: and one of them is l;oaded with fruit. When it comes close to being ripe, if it does that while I am not in Prague, I'll try to ask if I can pick some and give them jam in return.

Other forageables in the neighborhood are, of course, the yellow plums around the other corner, crabapples on Emma's old corner (I made very nice crabapple-jalapeno jelly out of them last year), manzanitas up the block from the yellow plums (but somebody else got them last year), a thing like a crabapple whose name I can never remember at the base of the Laurel Street hill, another wild plum tree on the steep path from the high school main campus to the gym, and another frustrating plum tree towards the top of Laurel Street Hill which has I believe prune plums and some of them reach the ground whole. Another neighbor has a quince tree, and the folks across the street have a fig tree. Nobody around here grows apricots because the climate is just barely okay and the ground water kills them. The same is true for peaches. But the plums from Woodstove and Sun produce a jam that is very like apricot. Also there are more manzanitas, which bear a little later, up on bay Street where the weird narrow park is that's dedicated to old-time Italian fishermen. Also, there are blackberries in various odd corners, naturally, and more plums at University Terrace Park, and I have the Satsuma plum tree and the apple tree.

So jam should not be difficult. Even being gone during the biggest jam month (JUly). My plums and apples come later than anybody else's.