Did some peach and blueberry jam over the summer. Happy-ish with the result -- the blueberry was too heavily spiced and the peach was too sweet. It's hard to find recipes with low-sugar pectin, though. And you can't go screwing around with the recipe unless you really know what you're doing. Meant to do some garden tomatoes too, but I missed the opportunity there.

Yep, my first experiments in preserving. Black currant jam, red currant jelly, green tomato chutney, lemon pickle, wax bean pickle, strawberry cordial, rhubarb and ginger cordial, black currant cordial, brandied plums and nettle ale.

I'm so impressed with you jam-and-pickle people! Homemade jam always tastes so much brighter and more vibrant than storebought.

I keep flirting with the idea of home canning; here in New England, it seems the simplest way to get a supply of jalepeño jelly. I even have my mom's recipe and a sister with all the equipment.

I wish I could find a formula for calculating the acid content of food, and another for assessing the safety of home canning low-acid foods. I have a recipe for onion jam that would be perfect to can, but I'm terrified of making little poison timebombs.

I haven't done any canning, but I've been freezing broccoli, green beans, carrots, and oranges. The broccoli has worked out wonderfully, the carrots are currently being tested right now (but they looked a little funny so I'm a bit nervous), oranges were a huge failure, and I haven't tried out the green beans yet.
I'm scared of doing 'real' canning, plus most of the stuff that's can-able isn't really what I eat. (I don't like pickles or jam.)

In a week or so I plan to do green tomato relish.

Sadly the only thing I ended up canning this year was strawberry/lime jam. I usually can bunches, but my garden this year was basically non-existent. SIGH. I did buy 20ish lbs (10ish kilos) of nice tomatoes that I made into sauce, salsa and juice. I froze it all, though.

On the other hand, however, this is an excellent excuse to actually eat up the stuff I canned two years ago and this year. In 2006 I put up something like 60 lbs of tomatoes, a bushel of apples as applesauce, several pints of dilly beans, and more jam than I'll ever be able to eat. I just decided that the jam will be giveaways for Bunnycon attendees.

My carrots didn't smell normal, but they didn't smell bad after cooking. I've eaten a few tonight as a test run and if I get sick, I'll have to throw out more stuff. :(

I did lime marmalade, passionfruit butter, corn relish, mild chutney, orange marmalade and cucumber relish. I can't wait for tomato season to well and truly start - I've got seedling for 6 different varieties nearly ready to be planted out. The anticipation is really getting to me!!

Middleclasstool: peach jam (sweet or other) sounds delicious. Pity you're not a bit closer to me. Swapsies?? ;)

Ooh. Wonder if I can ship fresh jam internationally? If so, I'd be happy to. I warn you, it be really sweet. E-mail me an address and I'll hook you up.

Es El Queso sent me fresh jam internationally once!

Made some amazing spicy fig orange marmalade the other day... must post recipe soon.

Please, I beg of you.

gomichild: recipe purty pleaassseeee!!! Because that sounds so damn delicious.

middleclasstool: drop an email to papessa[dot]ess[at]gmail[dot]com and let's work something out! Yum!!