We’re jamming (and I want to jam with you)

Perhaps it’s frugality, or perhaps it’s a love of food, or perhaps it’s the smell in the house … but we love making jam. And other things that we can can, or bottle up for later consumption.

Over the weekend, we cleaned out some chunks of the freezer and made two types of jam, and working largely with a sack of apples that Martha brought back from book group, we made a batch of chutney to boot.

When I say “we,” by the way, I largely mean Martha. She knows what she’s doing. I chop, fetch bottles and do what I can to not muck things up … and believe me, when you’re dealing with food safety and preserves, you need to be spot on in every respect.

We harvested some rhubarb in the summer (the gift from the garden that never stops giving — there’s still more out there to be cut!) and I chopped and bagged it for the freezer. Rhubarb pairs well with strawberry, so we used up a couple of huge bags of frozen fruit that had, frankly, been overstaying their welcome and taking up a lot of space. The yield: 16 bottles of 250 mls each. Sweet! But not too sweet. (Thank you, again, rhubarb.)

We also had a large frozen bag of raspberries that I had evidently forgotten about: I thought they were strawberries for some time! Martha threw in a container of delectable blackberries that we bought last week at the famed St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. There are another dozen bottles of those.

They’ll keep us in splendid breakfasts for months to come. Our pantry still has a considerable amount of things we’ve made.

The chutneys will probably not last so long. How could they?

It all started with apples

Martha reminded me that this odyssey started when our late, great friend Dave Roe offered us a bushel of apples. Well, first, it was a small bag. When we said we loved them, Dave upped the offer considerably.

We have since learned this is a problem that happens some seasons for people who have apple trees: you will have far, far more fruit than you can consume.

So, what do you do with a bushel of apples? We made apple butter. (Highly recommended with a pork roast, by the way.) We’ve also over the years made apple jelly, applesauce and apple pie filling: just enough in a bottle to pop in the oven with a crumb crust.

Want to make a brutal weeknight in March less intimidating? Pop one of these open. I guarantee you will forget about the cold.

We have other canning plans on the horizon. We have a large container in the freezer of roasted red peppers; when we get a good day in the coming weeks, we’ll finish the job and get them bottled.

We of course will be making more chicken stock. I wrote this post in February about the soul-enriching process of making stock, and — again — I hate letting anything go to waste. There’s always a baggie in the kitchen freezer to collect the latest onion bits, celery leaves, etc., and every roast chicken carcasses gets sealed up to be frozen, too.

Also coming up: I’ll be roasting some lamb bones, making a stock and hopefully a good few bowls of Scotch broth. Winter is coming, but I’m ready.

There is something, though, about jam. It keeps summer alive, and even now, in the fall months, it’s prime time to make a few jars of joy.

My headline today is of course a riff on Bob Marley. Perhaps this is the soundtrack for chopping, cutting, stewing and stirring.

I’ve just added Jamming to the Spotify playlist of songs mentioned here on the blog. Feel free to dip into it!