Jam

I know it's been a while and I have lots of things happening with lots of pictures and updates but I will post about them individually as time goes on. In the mean time I made Jam :)

So the other weekend Talia and I went to the cottage which was amazing and my parents let us borrow their car to go up. On the Sunday when we were going back home we dropped by their place to return the car except we arrived while they were still out so we just hung around and waited so we could say hi. While we were there we went into the back yard to look at how the garden was doing (not bad) and we noticed that the red current bushes were FILLED with nice ripe red currents so we started to pick then. We had some adventures because it started to down pour on us while we were picking. But we managed ok with the help of my 3rd cousin Thomas who is visiting from Germany for a month.

So after our picking frenzy we managed to walk away with about 6 cups of nice red currents. Sadly things got really busy for us with helping friends move and stuff but the currents sat nicely in the fridge for two weeks until today when I finally had time (and energy) to make some jam.

I used a modified recipe off the internet. I used 6 cups of red and black currents and 2 cups of water which I brought up to the boil and let simmer with a cover for 10 minutes.

Then I added 3 cups of sugar, the juice from 1 lemon, and a couple slugs of some French brandy (yes I bought brandy to cook with, should be fun times to come). I brought it back up to the boil and cooked it "HARD" <- recipes directions for a while, probably about 30 minutes. I also added a large piece of agar to give the jam a little more thickness. I don't know exactly how much was added sadly so reproducing this exact recipe could be a problem for me.

While the jam was boiling up I proceeded to set up the jars for canning. I started by turning the oven to 200F and sterilizing them for about 20 minutes. I also grabbed my pressure canner and filled it with some water to boil the canning rings and lids. Then it was off to the races and I filled 12 jars with delicious jam. Each jar was only a 125ml jar so I ended up grabbing out a left over 500ml and putting the extra jam in that.

~(' ')~