Рецепт Makin’ jam with mom and bakin’ away the rain
Mom was here at the tail end of my Spring Break last week. She was making one of her twice-yearly tours of Oklahoma, visiting family and friends. She was looking forward to some nice Oklahoma spring weather and she even brought mostly shorts and warm weather clothes. Woe to her that it was raining most of the week. We finally did have a beautiful weekend so she and I spent the rainy days cooking and we spent the beautiful weekend weather cleaning out flower beds and pruning roses.
On our cooking days, we made hot dog buns, Irish soda bread, pie crusts (or she did), raspberry-dark sweet cherry pie, and lots of raspberry jam. I was determined to get that box of frozen raspberries out of the freezer during our Clean Out. One day of jam making did just that.
I took a couple of recipes (Ginger Raspberry Jam and Raspberry-Ginger-Mint Jam) and used the best parts of both for my recipe below. This was my first foray into making preserves without pectin and without refined sugar.
Honeyed Raspberry Jam with Ginger and Fresh Mint
2 c. frozen raspberries
3 T. honey
1 T. fresh lemon juice
2 T. fresh ginger, grated
1/8 c. fresh minted, sliced into ribbons.
Combine raspberries, honey, lemon juice, and ginger in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally. Simmer until very thick, mashing with a potato masher and then stirring, about 10 minutes total.
Berries and ginger
Stir in mint.
This mint survived the winter!
Transfer mixture to sterilized jars; cover and chill at least 4 hours. Store for two weeks in the fridge. You may also use freezer containers and put this in the freezer for freezer jam (which last indefinitely—-or until you do a clean out!)
I made two batches of this and I used agave nectar in the second batch.
Our jam making mess
I then made a jam from a New Mexico memory. We bought some Raspberry-Chili-Ginger Jam on our very first trip to the Santa Fe Farmers Market. I had made something similar before with store-bought raspberry jam. This was my first attempt at making it homemade.
- Raspberry Jam with Ginger and Chili
- 4 c. frozen raspberries
- ¼ c. plus 2 T. honey
- 2 T. fresh lemon juice
- 1 t. red pepper flakes
- 4 T. ginger
Combine raspberries, honey, lemon juice, red pepper flakes and ginger in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally. Simmer until very thick, mashing with a potato masher and then stirring, about 10 minutes total.
Transfer mixture to sterilized jars; cover and chill at least 4 hours. Store for two weeks in the fridge. You may also use freezer containers and put this in the freezer for freezer jam
We also made some regulation jam using Pomona’s Universal Pectin. It uses almost 75% less sugar. I used a little over a cup of honey for my double batch.
All of the jam was a success and I was so glad we used honey and not seven cups of sugar per batch. (Isn’t that ridiculous?)
In the meantime, mom whipped up some of her pie crusts and made a raspberry-dark sweet cherry pie.
Mom's pie. She just threw the filling together without a recipe. It came out delicious!
Our next baking adventures were with bread. We had some locally made brats that we wanted to grill but I did not want to run back to the store for buns. We decided to try our hand making our own. I used mom’s sandwich roll recipe and put the buns in my baguette pan to bake.
Hot dog buns ready to rise with rosemary.
These turned out delicious and were perfect with the brats.
We also made Irish soda bread, but more about that later.
TGITh!!!!!!