We're jammin'

I have an ear-worm. You know, a song that you just can't get out of your head. It's Bob Marley's Jammin' and it's all thanks to last week's foraging session. I guess not many people would associate picking fruit in English hedgerows with a classic Reggae track but, to be fair, the music didn't permeate my brain until quite a few days later.

After the apple and damson 'tip offs' we set out with great enthusiasm armed with far too many tubs and pots in search of our hedgerow goodies.

At least, I thought I was probably being over-optimistic about the amount of fruit we'd find but the last thing I wanted was to be out and about and run out of containers. But as luck would have it, we hit gold! Or should that be purple, red and green?

If truth be told, I had to call a halt to the picking, particularly when it came to the apples. Outside in the big open countryside the containers looked fairly small, but in the confines of the kitchen, the prospect of having to do something with all that fruit suddenly hit me. It was quite a daunting prospect.

However, I was undeterred, and last Sunday morning rolled up my sleeves, gathered every single empty jam jar I could lay my hands on, plus a few that were swiftly emptied thanks to a rather random breakfast, and set to work.

Eight hours later I had 24 jars of apple chutney in three different variations: classic apple chutney, tamarind and apple chutney, and spiced apple chutney. The jars are all now squirrelled away busy maturing, ready for Christmas.

We also had 1.8kgs of blackberries macerating in 1.5kgs of jam sugar and 2.2kgs of stoned damsons. (Top tip: use a cherry stoner to get the stones out of damsons - it still took the best part of 3 hours but it was better than cutting them out with a knife, sieving them out of the finished jam, or - horror of horrors - making jam with stones in which you have to pick out of every mouthful!)

So, where does Bob Marley fit in? Well, that would have been after work on Monday when we made blackberry jam and some plum and apple jam, on Tuesday when we made some damson jam, and on Wednesday evening when we had to reboil the blackberry jam because it hadn't set. After a 2 hour commute and 8 hours in the office each day, things tended to get a bit silly as we heated, boiled and 'wrinkle tested' until I could barely keep my eyes open. At some point, Bob Marley popped into my head, shortly afterwards to be blared out of the iPod, to add to the general silliness!

So, we now have 30 pots of jam to go with the 24 jars of chutney. And it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that, at some point on Monday, a plum tree was found across the road and there is still a large bowl of beautiful plums awaiting further attention! Well, we seem to have mastered the setting point of jam so it would be a bit rude not to continue our jammin'.

Country pursuits

Having exchanged my very urban lifestyle to one much more rural, I have spent the last couple of weekends engaged in very country pursuits. And by that I mean foraging.

I have to say I've never seen so many beautifully fat and ripe blackberries in my life as there are within a stones throw of the house (and I'm not skilled at throwing stones a very great distance!) So far we have picked around 3 kilos and there are still many more for the picking.

To say that there are a few jars of blackberry gin on the go would be an understatement. We are even experimenting with blackberry and vanilla vodka.

And when we ran out of gin jars and room in the freezer, I progressed onto jam.

A huge crop of sloes has been spied but they are not quite ready yet, however the elderberries were at their best last weekend. I had no idea what to make with them but just couldn't leave them on the tree. In the end, the simplest thing to turn them into seemed to be cordial - great diluted with sparkling or still water or even, dare I say, sparkling wine!

We're now just off to pick apples as we've had a call from a friend who has more than he knows what to do with. Another friend has also alerted us to the location of a crop of damsons. To say I'm excited at the prospect of wondering down a green lane on a sunny, late summer afternoon, armed with some empty plastic containers would be a complete understatement. Sometimes it's the simplest of things that can make us happy!