Remember Tom Terrific? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_TerrificAnyway, is there anything more satisfying than the little *plurk* of hot jar lids sealing? Well, yeah (I do remember my 20's. And 30's. And 40's, come to think of it). But it's still a pretty darn satisfying sound.
I'm glad I was too tired (read:Lazy) to make jelly yesterday afternoon. Letting the juice settle a couple of days was A Good Thing. This morning (I finished, like, 10 minutes ago), I made 2 batches of jelly with the top liquid. I could have kept the murky stuff, and mixed it with any other fruit for a combo jam, but I was out of sugar and ambition. I ended up with 5 pints of crystal clear crab apple jelly, and 6 3/4 pints of lightly tinted, cinnamon crab apple jelly (the disparity comes from having not quite a full pint left from the first batch, which was blended into the second).
I think I absorb sugar through my skin when I make jam, but I also had to taste. It tastes even better than it looks (the plain is wonderful, but there is something really special about the cinnamon). Now to see if it actually jells (or if I have 12 pints of ice cream syrup) (and yes, it very likely will jell- I used the pectin recipe rather than just boiling. But I always worry about that).
Before I did pectin, which my daughter considers wimpy but I consider necessary, I got the two extremes -- ranging from syrup to taffy, which was actually sort of good. We could see that it was going in that direction and so pulled it. Unfortunately, I never could repeat this trick.
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