I love a good homemade marmalade – not the overly sweet, artificially flavored junk you find in the grocery store. No. I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness homemade marmalade where the citrus flavor pops the minute it hits your tongue.
Yeah…THAT.
Just as the flavor of a homegrown tomato cannot compare to the grocery store version, so too is it with homemade marmalade.
Many people think that making marmalade is too hard or even scary. But it really is not difficult – especially if you understand a few of the tricks. Here’s the scoop on how to make great marmalade and I’ve included a simple, yet delicious recipe to get you started.
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It happens to all of us.
- You make a great purchase at a farmer’s market for a bushel of vegetables
- A friend calls begging for you to come harvest the fruit off her over-burdened tree
- You have a crop in your backyard go all “crazy” with produce.
Each of these situations leave you with an abundance of produce that you either have to eat, put up or store. At times like these, we certainly can’t eat it all. And sometimes, we don’t have time to put it up. But we certainly should be able to store it!
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Day 7: Weck Jars
I have canned all my life, but I first learned about Weck jars about 18 years ago. They were the sexy European jars with cool shapes and these interesting clips. But back then, they were unattainable for me due to their high cost and the fact that you had to order them from Germany or England. A few years back, I saved up my pennies and bought a few. They rocked! I still use them and love them.
Today, Weck jars are still expensive (although less than before) and they are a lot easier to find because more people are doing home canning. They are looking for unusual alternatives to the typical mason canning jars and Weck fits the bill.
Peaceful Valley/GrowOrganic.com
Luckily for us, Peaceful Valley/GrowOrganic.com has offered to give one of YOU a case of SIX beautiful Weck canning jars to try for yourself! Now, I have to tell you that Peaceful Valley is one of my favorite go-to resources for not only canning supplies and homesteading equipment but all things garden and farm related. I buy from them all the time. [click to continue…]
If you’re a regular reader here, you know that I am managing the small orchard on our family farmstead in Northern California. Well as you can imagine, we’ve had literally hundreds of heirloom apples to deal with over the last few months. We have baked, canned, slow cooked (into apple sauce), dried, given away and eaten as many as we could.
So, I decided to “root cellar” the remaining apples from this season. Except that Oops!…I don’t have a root cellar. Ha!
No Cellar? No worries!
There are plenty of other places you can store apples. You just need to know a few simple tricks!
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We have this peach tree at the farmstead that is KILLER! When you bite into one of those peaches, the juice just runs down your chin, your hand, your arm...You get the picture.
I wanted to capture that flavor (and memory) in a jar to enjoy during the winter months. But if I used a typical pectin-peach jam recipe, all you would taste is granulated sugar because a standard recipe calls for 7 cups of sugar. Yes 7 CUPS!
These peaches were sweet enough on their own. They didn't need that much sugar.
But when canning with pectin, that sugar is not there for flavor. It is there to create the gel. It is like a crazy science experiment in that the sugar meshes with the pectin and the acidity of the fruit to create the firm product. If you cut back on the sugar, you get syrup and no gel.
So, you have two choices when you have this dilemma.
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Theresa Loe is the award- winning Co-Executive Producer & Canning Expert on Growing A Greener World TV. She blogs here about Living Homegrown®, local and fresh-from-the-garden. 
