Sunday, November 6, 2011

Canning

I’ve been on a canning kick lately. It started with a recipe for peach butter that Deb at Smitten Kitchen posted. It was so, so good. I ate a spoonful  every morning in my oatmeal and it was hard to resist dipping the spoon in the jar at other times. My stores of peach butter started to run low right when the farmers’ market was packed full of delectable local apples. I brought home several bags and made some apple butter without a recipe. It was… meh.

I’d been craving lemon, so on Friday, I made a lemon raspberry marmalade.

It was a bit too sweet. I think I’ll leave out a tiny bit of sugar if I make it again. It’s a lovely, vibrant color, though, and very lemony.  I zested the lemons, rather than grating them. Grating would make it more like orange marmalade and less like raspberry jam.
I had to wait several days for my Bartlett pears to ripen in a paper bag with bananas and apples, but today they were just the right degree of squishiness. I made this pear-cranberry butter from a 1982 New York Times recipe. It took about five hours to firm up (not 50 minutes), but I hope the butter will be worth the wait. The jars are still cooling now.

1 comment:

  1. Pear-cranberry butter sounds amazing. I wonder if using the marmalade on sourdough would help balalnce the sweetness? Or maybe mixing with plain yogurt for a snack?

    ReplyDelete