Making apple jelly

Apple jellies sound complicated but they aren't.  They are a bit time consuming but it is that sort of time where you just have to be around for a bit, not necessarily paying it very much attention.  So if you can just give it a little time, during most of which you don’t need to pay your jelly any attention at all, here is how to make an apple jelly. The only thing you need which you may have to buy is muslin, either in a ready made bag (Lakeland do one) or as a length of material to make your own. You will also need four or five empty jam jars with screw lids.  I use a preserving pan but a large pan of any kind will do fine.

Jellies are easy, no peeling or lengthy preparation, and they produce jewel coloured jars which shine on your shelves and which can be used to accompany meats (apple and mint jelly with lamb, apple and sage with pork), to add depth of flavour to stews (quince jelly in beef casseroles or in gravy) or to have on bread or toast like jam.
Start with a couple of kilos of apples, cooking apples or eaters, it makes no difference. Chop off any bits which are badly bruised. You don’t need to peel or core them. Chop them in half and then in half again and put them in a large pan. Add about a litre and a half of water.


This is the basic recipe for starting off an apple jelly. In the autumn I might make jellies with other herbs but by late January many herbs have disappeared or become so tatty and sad they are best left alone until spring.  Today I decided to use a pot of mint which I had been keeping alive on the kitchen windowsill.

To the apple and water mix add a large handful of mint leaves.  Simmer this until the apples are soft and mushy. Depending on the kind of apples you are using and the state they are in whey they go into the pan, this will take from half an hour to an hour or so. Just stir them from time to time to see if they are collapsing.

When they are soft turn off the heat and put them into a muslin bag suspended over a pan. I have a butcher’s block with a shelf on the bottom which works well for this but traditionally you could upturn a stool.
Transfer the pulp to the muslin bag using a jug or a large ladle. When I do this I hold the jug or ladle over a bowl to stop the apple puree dripping everywhere. Leave the puree to drip over the pan. Giving this process time is all that matters. Don’t squeeze the bag, don’t poke or prod. Just let it drip slowly and gently for at least twelve hours and up to twenty four. If you squeeze the bag at all the resulting jelly will be cloudy and will not give you the jewel bright clarity which will glow in its jar and cheer up the darkest day.

When the muslin bag has stopped dripping it is time to for the next stage. Pour the clear juice into a measuring jug. For every 600ml of juice add 400g of sugar, ordinary granulated is fine.
Bring the mixture slowly to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add 100ml of cider vinegar.  When the sugar is dissolved turn up the heat and let the liquid boil hard for ten minutes or so. If any scum comes to the surface take it off with a slotted spoon.

While this is happening put yesterday’s newspaper onto the shelf of an oven at its lowest possible setting. Stand the clean empty jars on the paper and set the oven timer for ten minutes. Put a small plate in the fridge.

Turn off the oven, take the liquid off the heat and test for setting. You do this by dropping a teaspoon of the hot liquid onto the cold plate you have taken from the fridge. Put it back in for a minute and then test for setting by pushing the liquid with the tip of your finger. If it wrinkles when you push it, it is ready. If not, put the liquid back onto the heat and boil again for a few more minutes. Then test again. How long it takes to get to setting point depends on the kind of apples you are using.  Sometimes it will set quite quickly, sometimes it might take as long as an hour's boiling.  It will happen if you boil it hard enough for long enough so don't give up and put it in jars too early!

When your teaspoon of liquid is wrinkling under your finger, pour the jelly into jars and screw on the tops. Sometimes there is a little bit of scum on the surface, and if so you can just skim it off with a spoon either before or after you put it into the jars. I sometimes add fresh herbs at this point, partly because it looks pretty  but I had used all the mint today.  Leave it to set. It will take a couple of hours, until the jars are completely cold. When they are cold label them with the contents and the date. A beautiful handwritten label looks good, or if you are like me and have illegible handwriting, print computer produced ones. Store. Eat with roast lamb or cold meat. Feel like a domestic goddess.

A quick explanation

Reading a blog from VP (great gardening based blog) I found that blogger has provided the opportunity for you to add more pages.  This seemed a great idea to me as it allows you to provide an about page to say a little about yourself for people who are new to the blog and also to set up additional tabs to create other pages for your interests and passions.

So I have had a go at creating an about page and a page specifically for The Blackden Trust, a place I would like to share with others.

What do you think?  Does it just seem like wallpaper or white noise?  Are you interested to read extra stuff?

Miscellany

My friend (I hope I can use this word about a relationship in its early tentative real stages but further along perhaps in virtual life) Friko has inspired me with her miscellany blog so I hope she won't mind my pinching the idea.

What has touched me, meant something to me, this week, large and small?

Last Tuesday I went to a service of thanksgiving for the life of a blogging friend who died far too young.  She was one who had made the leap from virtual to real friend.  A group of us living on the borders between England and Wales (she on the English side, I on the Welsh) met  a couple of years ago and found a mass of things in common.  She had struggled for years with serious ill health but was the liveliest, sparkiest, least self pitying person you could find, looking outward when she could have been forgiven for looking in, fascinated by the world and by people, the kind of person who is quietly, consistently kind.  We gathered in a tiny church in Herefordshire to say farewell.  The church was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields where grassed humps and dykes showed traces perhaps of earlier dwellings.  Four of us who were blogging friends arrived early and sat, we thought, to one side to leave the main body of the church for friends and family and neighbours.  The church began to fill, and fill.  They were sitting people in the choir stalls, bringing out extra chairs until all chairs were full, and eventually thirty or so people stood in the aisle.  Her husband spoke and made us laugh.  A special send off for an unusual and special woman.

Then a couple of days with my daughter, son in law and the new baby.  The baby has just reached the smiling stage.  On the first day I worked hard for my eventual smile but on the second morning was taken by surprise and delight when he beamed and crowed and hooked me like an expert angler.  How powerful an evolutionary weapon a smile is for a baby.  They need to attach their carers to them with grappling hooks for the long, slow process of human dependency and, just when the sleepless nights would be beginning to wear out the new parents, suddenly there is the magical reward of a small baby smile to hold you fast and entranced.

Laughing until tears ran down my face at the comedian Rhod Gilbert on Live at the Apollo.  Look out for him.  He may be the funniest man alive.

I learnt how to knit on three double ended needles inspired by Pomona and with the eventual intention of knitting a sock, maybe two if I really get the hang of it.  I am not the most likely person to take to knitting.  I used to do loads when I was a teenager growing up in New Zealand with no money and no television and not much else to do but I haven't done any for years.  It is just a bit slow for me.  I lose patience.  But knitting in the round is weirdly intriguing and weirdly satisfying and every now and then I read one of my favourite bloggers like Pomona or Pipany and see some really beautiful wool and think maybe it is time to rediscover the lost pleasure of something taking shape between your fingers. 

A poem by Mary Webb, which could have been written standing at my front door, looking out across the hills:

Against the gaunt, brown-purple hill
The bright brown oak is wide and bare;
A pale-brown flock is feeding there--
Contented, still.
No bracken lights the bleak hill-side;
No leaves are on the branches wide;
No lambs across the fields have cried;
--Not yet.
But whorl by whorl the green fronds climb;
The ewes are patient till their time;
The warm buds swell beneath the rime--
For life does not forget.

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Hens and hellebores

The snow has gone and the hens are out and about again.  Here is one of the cockerels at the base of the side garden wall.  Somewhere along the foot of the wall snowdrops are just beginning to show.  I shall not be impressed if they are scratched up but mostly at this time of year the hens are good garden companions and will probably not bother with any good sized clump.  It will be another couple of months before we start the frantic seed sowing which means that every bed needs to be protected until the plants get to a decent size.

Here is the little white Wyandotte, still my favourite hen even though she is not as good a layer as the others.  She is so small and fluffy and looks like a chicken from a children's book.  Because she is a bit smaller than the others she has to run to keep up with them and is often to be found flurrying down the garden , a few yards adrift of the flock, trying hard not be left behind.

But I do also love the brown hens which look just as hens should.  The Welsummer on the left lays beautiful dark brown eggs.  The gingery brown hen on the right is a cross between a Welsummer and a Buff Orpington.  The cross means that she should be a great broody hen so in the spring, assuming she does go broody, we are going to let her raise some chicks.  The whole miraculous business of eggs becoming tiny chickens in twenty one days, all cheep and yellow fluff, is something which everyone should see at least once in a lifetime and at just coming up to four years old older grandson will bounce around with excitment (so will I).

Spring must be out there over the horizon somewhere.  Shutting up the hens has  moved from about quarter past four to nearer five o' clock and the hellebores have just started to bloom.  For some reason the cat was so determined to be in the photograph that I had to give up on this, my sixth attempt, to record the only one which is properly in flower.

And the Arum Italicum which I bought as a tiny plant on last year's visit to Great Dixter is unfurling its beautiful marbled leaves.

Spring is out there somewhere.

The eternal balancing act

I have always been inclined to bite off more than I can chew.  Having too much to do if you get it right is energising and exciting and gives your life zip and zoom.  Having too much to do if you get it wrong is overwhelming and exhausting and makes you want to hide in the lavatories and have a quiet weep.  Mostly I used to get it right.  Then for a few years I tried to do way too much and had a constant battle to keep any kind of balance between my work and my family life and found that niceties like a social life and time for myself disappeared out the window.  Now having given up my job I supposedly have all the time in the world.

This is never the case of course.  You just do lots more of the things that you choose to do, and if you are a person with a tendency to load a lot on your plate, you carry on doing that, just different and perhaps more self indulgent things.  Now, however, I think I should admit that maybe I ought to be getting to the end of my glorious time off phase and looking to find some means of making a financial contribution again.  And glorious although my gardening, reading, growing things, cooking, eating, walking and making time for friends and family has been, there is a part of me that is quite excited by the idea of using my business brain again. 

So this is just a reminder to myself of all the things I want to have time for before I rush into juggling too many balls in the air again:

I want to have time for my family - my parents, my husband, my children and my little grandson ("No Grandma, I am big now") and my new baby grandson.  I want to have time for friends who for so many years were crammed into the rag ends of my life while I whizzed around from pillar to post.  I want to have time for my garden so that it feels a pleasure, not another guilt inducing, never ending task.  I want time to wander and walk and do my Welsh and my yoga and learn to knit a pair of socks in the round (thank you Pomona for the inspiration).

So I need to do the next stage carefully, consciously, ensuring I can do a good job of whatever I take on and protect my oh so hard won personal time.  Slowly, carefully, one step at a time, fighting my own tendency to want to do everything and to take on all the interesting things that are possibilities.  It is exciting.  It is surprisingly daunting.

Wish me luck.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

When I was a child I loved the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, especially "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe".  I also adored "The Magician's Nephew" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader".  I remember sitting on the edge of my bed with a brand new copy of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in a white paper bag on the bed beside me, a present from my mother.  I could practically feel it singing to me.  I took it out, and looked at the cover and turned it over in my hands and put it back in the bag so that I could have the pleasure of taking it out again.  I knew that once I started to read it I would gallop through it, reading on the lavatory and in bed and on the bus to school, until I started to feel travel sick, reading at the table with the book on my lap until my mother caught me doing it.  I was a voracious reader and a fast one and the book would soon be finished, so spinning out the time before I began was a necessary part of extending the excitement.

My favourite bit of "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" was the part when the grip of the endless, spellbound winter loosened and the snow began to melt, the streams began to move and there was the sound of water running beneath the ice.  The snow softened and the grass began to show green.  The iron grip of ice and snow dissolved into a growing, greening, shifting world.

It has been a little like that up here today.  We have had deep, deep snow, drifting and forming heaving frozen seas in the kitchen garden.  The path in front of the house has been dug out and dug out again.  When I went for corn for the chickens this morning I had to dig out the steps down to the pigsty because they were buried in snow again.  The great white hat of snow above the grey slates of the bakehouse had slipped down in the night and dumped a ridge of snow on the path.  As I dug I heard the soft drip, drip, drip of water running into the cast iron gutters.  There was a crump and thump behind me and a huge ten foot wide avalanche of snow slid off the house roof and hit the ground by the porch.  Life was on the move again.

While the kale was still standing bravely in deep snow a trudge through the drifts down to the greenhouse revealed the first of the thaw.  There are gooseberries in there somewhere, struggling out above the snow amidst the bare apple trees.

And here is proof that the world is still green under all that white.  The kitchen garden faces south east and is catching the very first of the rise in temperature.  You do not have to go far to find the grip of winter still tight on the north side of the cottage.

But in front of the cottage where the big pots stand the violas have shaken off the snow.

I love them.  It may even be that we shall lose enough of the deep blanket of snow over the weekend for me to find some glaucous green snowdrops just poking through. 

It may not be spring but the snow is on the move.

How is it where you are?

Resolutions

Yes, I know it not the 1st of January.  I'm just a bit late.  One of the good things about blogging is that it is so easy to check what I have been doing in January for the last couple of years.  I see that last year I didn't make any resolutions at all and the year before I tried to make postive resolutions rather than the usual "lose weight, drink less, exercise more" litany that has been following me around for years.

Reading them now from 2008 I see I didn't too terribly well with the ones I did make.  The resolution to cook more interestingly, using my huge range of cookery books, was the one which was most successful.  I can't say I achieved the one about being glamourous on Thursdays.  I do from time to pull out something which is not the ubiquitous jeans and fleece and dress up a bit, but it is more like once every couple of months than once a week - less in winter because the urge to keep my clothes on when I have got dressed is very powerful.

But I have always been a bit of a sucker for resolutions: the clean page, the new exercise book with its cover still stiff and clean, the sense of giving your life a bit of an overhaul.  So I am going to make some for 2010, just a small number and ones which should not change the world, but some of which might be achievable, some of the time.

So two gardening ones:

1. Make better use of my greenhouse.  In summer I love my greenhouse and from March onwards it is heaving for a couple of months with seedlings waiting to go outside.  In summer my husband takes over with tomatoes but I have never really cracked growing other things in summer.  By winter it is sad and empty and overflowing with empty plastic pots and half empty bags of compost.  I hate cleaning it so it languishes until the spring when I get carried away with enthusiasm for it all over again.  I was delighted to read that Deb at Carrots and Kids suffers from exactly the same thing, so it isn't only me.  This year I will try to grow more in the greenhouse, look after it more carefully and make better use of the extended season it offers me.
2. Do more successional sowing.  This is a resolution which is beginning to be up there with the "lose weight, take more exercise, drink less" ones as a hardy perennial.  I made some inroads on this in 2009.  I did have successional sowings of broad beans and peas and mangetout.  If I were the successional sowing queen of my dreams I would not have run out of steam with the peas and beans bed.  This year I will have salad stuff for months on end, I will, I will.

And some looking after myself ones:

1. more yoga because I love it even though I will never be really bendy.
2. more walking because I loved my Offa's Dyke walk and have done very little since then.
3. more nights without a glass of wine in my hand (not too many).

And a couple of what is life for ones:

1. more Welsh.  I really do want this to be the year I move from partial understanding and an inability to talk to anyone beyond other Welsh learners to the year I can understand S4C and have a real conversation.
2. less time on the computer.  I know this is ironic in a blog and I love my laptop to bits and wouldn't be without it, but at least a couple of nights  a week this year I shall turn it off, read, talk to my beloved, not see the world through a haze of tweets or an avalanche of blogs.  That will be a hard one I suspect and I would love to hear from anyone who feels they have the balance right between their real and their virtual life, but it is worth a go.

So, there we are.  Let's see how it goes!

And then the sun came out

And the world glistened white and shining.  It is cold as cold but the sky is vivid and the air sings with cold.  The birdfeeders are thronged with birds who fluttered and twittered in the trees as I filled them.  Even the woodpecker has been swinging and tapping on the peanuts all day long.

The valley is perfect and untrodden.  If you watch for long enough you will see a quadbike making its way along the other side, down the steep slopes, a bale of hay strapped to it .  You will see the sheep gathering or the sharp black shape of a horse moving across the field towards the black shape of the woods.  A tractor makes it way along the road in the bottom of the valley but no cars move.  No post comes.

The hedges are works of art.

We have spent the day shovelling snow, bringing in logs and kindling, tramping down to the pumphouse which controls our water supply, checking and sorting, feeding the chickens and the cats and the peacock.  The weather forecast predicts days of low temperatures and further snow and ice.  I try to take the sensible precautions and I feel the little leap of apprehension at the power of the weather and what can still come.  But let us just for a moment live the absolute beauty of today.

The world has disappeared

My world has shrunk to a whirl of white. This morning the hawthorn hedge was a sculpture, the stone walls grey and white, the valley had disappeared and the view from the gate was a soft grey smudge.  This afternoon even the hedge and the bakehouse are disappearing into a whirl of falling snow and these pictures seem clear and sharp, when the world now is a blur of falling white.  A tiny wren has taken refuge under the eaves of the house by the unused front door.  I can see the peacock's tracks silting up with snow, gently being obliterated.

This is true silence.  When the cat miaowed at me suddenly in the quiet kitchen I leapt out of my skin.  As I close the door again against the relentless soft fall I feel sharply and thankfully what a refuge this old house has been against the snow and the rain for hundreds of years.  Outside is beautiful but cruel and alien.  Inside the lights glow and the fire burns.  I am here by myself and making bread . The familiar weighing out and kneading is a reassurance against the snow steadily building and piling against the house. Ian has borrowed a landrover. I hope he can get home.

Silence falls

For the last two weeks the house and the cottage have been full of people.  Younger son's dog (possibly the best behaved and gentlest black lab in the world until you tell me different) has been lying on the rug by the fire.  Elder daughter's baby has spent the fifth and sixth weeks of his life being passed around his various adoring aunts, uncles and grandparents.  There has always been someone to walk around singing to him when he got cranky and to sit with him sleeping on their chest.  He has been fascinated by the pattern of the beams on the ceilings in both the kitchen and the sitting room of the farmhouse, staring up wide eyed at the lines of the brown oak against the white paint.

Much food has been made in the battered kitchen, with first younger son and daughter in law, and then as younger daughter arrived and they left, younger daughter, working with me, sometimes taking over completely, sometimes being the vegetable peeler or the gravy maker, working away companionably.  We like food in our family, like growing it, cooking it, thinking about it, talking about it, eating it.  Much wine has been drunk too, though in a pretty moderate sort of a way, and much chocolate eaten.  We have walked the dog and crunched about in the snow.

And today everyone has gone although we have visitors coming to the holiday cottage tonight.  The silence, after all the noise and laughter and coming and going, is profound.  All I can hear is the sound of the logs burning in the stove and faintly, from Ian's study, the clatter of the keyboard as he uses the computer.   On New Year's Eve we had a fire out in the field.  It was a full moon, once in a blue moon, and the moonlight on the snow was eerily bright, a silver gray world glowing and gleaming like a great frosted bowl.  It is not as bright as that tonight but the world still glows faintly white with the moon on snow.  I am torn between my usual pleasure at having the place to myself and the tug of yearning to have my family back.  By tomorrow I will be used to it again and it will be good to have some time just the two of us but tonight I am missing the laughter of the girls, the feel of the baby settled against my chest, the sound of my husband and son in law talking from the kitchen, the easy going presence of the dog, curled by the fire.

It has been a good couple of weeks stolen from the world.

Here is the peacock, remarkably tolerant of the snow, making his contribution.