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So this weekend I had a frenzy of baking and cooking stuff. The local abandoned cemetery has meeeeeeellions of blackberries, of which a large number are now ripe. I decided I would make jam, and collected a few kilos of blackberries. As Bob has pointed out, this meant that I was making jam form dead people. Is it still vegetarian? Anyhow, being ignorant of jam-making I looked at the many and varied recipes for jam on the web and chose the simplest. My method went like this: Put 500g blackberries in pan Add 250g tate and lyle cane sugar (recommended by the WI!) Add juice of half a lemon and mix Put pan on lowish heat, and bring to boil, stirring occasionally. Recipies tell you to skim off the scum, but I ignored it and it disappeared. Once on the boil, I turned the heat down and stirred it a bit more often as it was now boiling happily away. The blackberries all broke down. As I have nothing so sophisticated as a jam thermometer, I boiled it for about 10 minutes, until it started to go a bit syrupy, and then did the saucer test, dropping blobs on a saucer to see how it set as it cooled. I have no idea how long I boiled it in total - maybe 15-20 minutes? This made enough for one and a half jam jars - I did this recipe twice, making 3 jam-jars-worth, as on the net I'd seen dire warnings about jam mix foaming up and I didn't have a hugeish pan. In the event, I could probably have gotten away with doing a kilo of berries at a time. Results: Tasty blackberry jam. As it cooled completely to room temperature, it set rather solid. As I like my jams sloppy in the continental style, I will attempt a shorter boil next time. Also, it was quite sweet, though not overbearingly so, so next time I will try it with less sugar and maybe a little more lemon juice. I also tried kake's fantastic gingerbread recipe (http://www.earth.li/~kake/cookery/recipes/gingerbread.html). Soya fake products are not my thing; happily, I can report that the recipe works fine with butter instead of soya marg and real milk instead of soy milk. Finally, I made banana bread: 250 g plain flour 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda 1/4 tsp salt 115 g butter 110 g brown sugar 2 eggs, beaten approx 500 g mashed overripe bananas - about 3-4 bananasworth Preheat oven to 175C. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. Stir in eggs and mashed bananas into butter mix until well blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture until all mixed and moist. Pour batter into greased 2lb loaf tin. Bake in preheated oven for 60 to 65 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. You may want to cover the top with tinfoil if it starts to get very dark. Cool in tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Today I only had 3 bananas which were about 400g in total, so I added a splash of milk to moisten the batter a bit. If there are more than 500 g of bananas, I tend to leave the batter as is unless it's really sloppy - it just means the cake is even gooier and better. If there are no allergy sufferers around, I might add some chopped walnuts to the recipe. So that was my day of heady domesticity. -Jakob
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