Peaches, More Peaches and Apriums

Guess who brought home fruit today. You got it. WG!! I bought a basket of peaches from the farmers market last week and just prepped the last of it for a second batch of jam. I'm making a small batch of peach butter with a recipe from smitten kitchen. 

FYI: peach butter like apple butter has no dairy in it. This recipe is only fruit, sugar, water,  lemon juice and time to cook down and thicken up. The house smelled great--very peachy. 

Jamming in my new vintage jam pot

Slightly shy of 2 pints of peach butter

Then WG walks in with a giant box of fruit. Now I have a box of white peaches, to tend to. Not sure why WG bought it. He doesn't really like white peaches [I like them but I can't eat this much]. He always complains that they are too tart for him. Well, if he doesn't like batch, I guess, I'll use some of them to make a batch of my white peach cupcakes. I haven't made a batch this year. Maybe I'll pick up some raspberries from the farmers market to combine with it. hmmmm. . . .maybe white peach and raspberry cupcakes with raspberry buttercream. 

Enough complaining about too much fruit, on to the next stone fruit. . . . I've been in search of those sweet italian plums, deep dark purple on the outside, yellow/green on the inside to make a batch of jam. Haven't seen them but I've missed the farmers market a couple of weeks in a row. Did I miss them already. Sad face!

These were from last year, so sweet! I hope I didn't miss you.

But I've might have found a substitute if I missed the italian plums--Apriums. It's a hybrid of apricots and plums--75% apricot. Apricot and Plum jam are my favorites, so these will probably be a great sub. They have a reddish plum skin-not the fuzzy apricot skin with slight orange inside. It's really sweet, kind of a combination of apricot/plum flavor. WG liked these. Making a small batch of jam to see how it taste and eat the rest. 

Prepped and ready to be jammed

Used the Plum Jam recipe from Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves by Linda Ziedrich, adjusted that sugar slightly because these were so sweet. 

Beautiful red color and what a great taste

This is what I got. 2 pints of beautiful red sweetness. Will definitely pick them up again, when I'm finally out of fruit.

By the way, WG came home with a pineapple and melon plus 8 lbs of strawberries, too. He asked me if 6lbs was enough for me. Oye! what is he thinking. He is the man of "more is better". He also does this with other things than food, too. I think is is early signs of being a hoarder. 

Sigh! Guess who, gets to toss these things out. 

A Festival of Strawberries

Guess who brought home 8 lbs. of strawberries then a couple days later 4 more lbs. plus 4.5 lbs of blackberries [I think he thought I used up all the 8 lbs by then]. Yup, you got it. I don't know what WG think I have in time to make jam and dessert but he sure must think I have a lot.

Prepping 5+ lbs of strawberries 

So today was a festival of strawberries after I finished my 1/2 day Summer Fridays [haha at 4pm, not so quite a 1/2 day Friday]. Here's the list of recipes that I hoped to whip up. 

• Strawberry Orange Jam [new recipe] 
• River Cafe Strawberry Sorbet
• SmittenKitchen.com Strawberry and Cream biscuits 
• Or my Strawberry cake recipe

My first recipe was the Strawberry Orange Jam from The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves by Linda Ziedrich. I've tried several good recipes from this book and it has lots of great informations about jams and preserves. I figured I would find a new recipe for strawberries as I already made a batch my strawberry jam.  

Here's the recipe and below are the modifications I made. 

1 medium-sized orange

3 lbs  strawberries, hulled

4 1/2 c sugar

Remove the zest of the oranges in thin shreds. Squeeze out the juice and put it and the zest  into a preserving pan. Add the strawberries to the pan and mash them if they are firm. Cover the pan and simmer the strawberries until they are soft

Remove the pan from the heat and add the sugar. Stir the contents over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. raise the heat to medium-high and boil the jam, stirring and skimming off the foam, until a drop mounds slightly in a chilled dish.

Ladle the jam into pint or half-pint mason jars. Add lids and rings, and process the jars for 10  minutes in a boiling-water bath. 

I didn't change up the recipe too much. I just added 1/2 cup less of sugar [I always add less sugar because I don't like so sweet] and add part of the juice orange to a cheese cloth and added it to the jam when I added the sugar [the last batch of marmalade that I made I did this and love the way it thickened up]. I chopped the strawberries instead of mashing it. I had already chopped them the night before [out of habit from my strawberry jam recipe].

2 pints and 3 1/2 pints ready to be eaten

I most definitely will make this recipe again. It smelled great as it was cooking up. I think the orange zest and juice made the scent of the jam not as sweet as the straight strawberry that can be overly sweet smelling at times. And it really tasted great. I guess that what happens when you use sweet fruits as both the strawberries and the oranges were very sweet. It's a chunky jam. I think my mom would love this one.

Next up River Cafe Strawberry Sorbet that I got from Food52. I made this last year and what and intense flavor of strawberries and lemon. Really good with a drizzle of condensed milk. You blitz a whole chopped lemon skin and all with the sugar in the food processor then add the strawberry puree and lemon juice. Then put it in your ice cream maker. This time I was lazy and didn't blitz the lemon and sugar enough so the lemon pieces are a bit chunky as is the strawberries. I guess I was losing steam from not so 1/2 day Friday. 

All ready for the ice cream maker

So I started to prep my strawberries for biscuits or cake, when I realized that I need to make creme brûlée for the restaurant. Then I realized that didn't have enough eggs to do both. I decide to eat dinner, then run out to get some eggs.

I guess this will have to wait till tomorrow

And maybe I should stop at to see the distress plants at Lowe's [the plant whisperer--my mom got me in the habit of visiting this rack first to see what we can save. Both money-wise and plant-wise] and get something to wash my car. 3 marigolds, 2 6-pks of impatiens, and 1 peruvian lily later, I'm too tired to start making biscuits or cake or creme brûlée. So I guess the festival of strawberries continues tomorrow with special guest of Blackberry Vanilla Jam. Stay tune for more strawberry goodies.