Quick and easy apricot jam with a touch of spice. Kids usually like red jams, at least I did when I was one. Strawberry, raspberry, cherry; once I was hugely let down by redcurrant which was too sour and pippy; and I didn’t quite trust black jams with the exception of blueberry.
Fragrant blueberry jam made in a small batch with a sprig of rosemary is the flavour match made in heaven. This will be your all-time best homemade jar of jam.
Bramble jelly, seedless jam made from wild blackberries. Bramble picking would be the nicest and the most rewarding type of foraging – they are plentiful and in plain view, unlike mushrooms
Indulgent cherry jam with preserved chunks of cherries. The best thing about eating cherries is spitting out the pips, right ahead, no matter where.
Homemade clotted cream, thickened cream made by long and slow heating double/heavy cream in a shallow dish. The first time I made it, we had people staying for the weekend. We all went out for food, or I cooked, and at one or two occasions
Slow roasted tomato confit. It brings out the flavour hidden deep when it comes to those plasticky looking imported fruits. It’s a slow job – the longer the better. They should still retain their shape but become very soft and quite a bit darker in colour.
Fig confit with fresh fig chunks in madeira syrup, great with cheese or charcuterie. Something with figs but not jam was the objective. Why not jam?
Quick refrigerator pickles made with cucumbers, asparagus and carrot slices. There are some quite peculiar myths concerning food and eating that people believe in.
Quick and simple glace cherries recipe: make your own candied fruit. They will last for a couple of weeks in a jar. Joking, of course – they’ll never last that long…
Basic kimchi made with Chinese leaf cabbage and garlic, ginger and carrots. Kimchi is delicious with fried rice, adding a kick and a hit of sourness to the grain. You can also make kimchi pancakes, kimchijeon, which must be a lot like Japanese okonomiyaki. I haven’t tried the former, have the latter so can happily vouch for deliciousness.
Peach jam with a hint of vanilla, easy to make and very flavoursome. Peach jam fools everyone. You think (well, I did) it doesn’t even exist or at most belongs with those quaint outlandish preserves made by niche artisan hipsters in tiny quantities, like courgette or banana.
Quick pickled jalapeño peppers, crunchy and sweet and hot. The best pickled jalapeños are homemade, and these are ready within about an hour. Make sure you wear gloves!
Pomegranate jelly, mega flavoursome stuff and not so very difficult to make. I’m a pomegranate fiend. It is an addiction, obsession, guilty secret – call it whatever, I can eat pomegranates for England and any other country I might call home.
Pomegranate molasses made using fresh fruit. It is powerful stuff and works a treat as meat glaze, acidity provider in dressings and sauces, dropped on cereal and dribbled over ice cream. Even if calling it molasses is a thorough misnomer.
Homemade raspberry jam. I used to think that to make jam you need tonnes and tonnes of fruit and it takes hours and hours of boiling the stuff in huge pans, with lots of splattering and covering the kitchen with sticky gunk – NO.
Homemade spiced sauerkraut, dead easy, can be made in small quantities. I should be talking all about raw and fermented so I’m side-tracking. Recipes abound, everyone is fermenting like crazy and the reports of all those good bacteria doing wonders to our guts are making poor old sauerkraut blush.
Homemade strawberry jam with a twist of lemon and a sprinkle of black pepper enhancing the strawberry flavour. Jamming is preserving fruit in sugar. Jam is fruit cooked in sugar. There isn’t anything fresh, low-calorie or low-carb about jam, let alone keto or other paleo-nonsense.