Pear jam?

[hmk]

The Pear and lemon jam on the Cottage Smallholder site that SusieGee linked to is delicious. Fiona has some great recipes on her site, and I highly recommend that one.

HMK

[Millymollymandy]

Thanks HMK I am thinking about that one, but still waiting on the pears! Inundated with peaches right now......

[hmk]

I wouldn't mind being inundated with peaches

I have apples...everywhere. In the shed, ready to be turned into cider; bags of eating apples ready to be wrapped and stored in the hallway; bags of misc apples in the kitchen; apple rings and leather in the dehydrator; apple and blackberries on the stove (probably for more leather); cooling jars of bottled apple sauce on the work surface; jelly bags dripping apple juice for apple jelly on the kitchen table. I think there are even a few apples in the fruit bowl. Which begs the question...why am I sitting here on the computer?!

HMK

[oldjerry]

MMM have you thought about preserving some of those pears in Brandy?

[Millymollymandy]

No cos I don't drink! It wouldn't really preserve very many though would it. I mean I have a treeful, hundreds of them so even in syrup that'd be an awful lot of jars.... But last year they never ripened up properly so I am a bit worried - I've had a few windfalls but they weren't very sweet or they were starting to rot inside. Anyway in the meantime I am munching away on peaches and hmk my cellar-cum-laundry/mud room is getting rather full of apples for storing, peaches and windfalls for cooking with. No room in the kitchen cos that's full of tomatoes!

We've just had a huge branch snap off the old cider apple tree which took part of the trunk with it but it's biennial bearing and impossible to thin out the completely overloaded fruit, and we've been pruning it back over the years so the branches aren't so long but they just can't cope. We don't do anything with these apples so if anyone wants to come and collect to make cider, be my guest.

[hmk]

Anyway in the meantime I am munching away on peaches and hmk my cellar-cum-laundry/mud room is getting rather full of apples for storing, peaches and windfalls for cooking with. No room in the kitchen cos that's full of tomatoes!

Lol!

Sorry to hear about your tree. DH and his friends are off apple collecting for their cider syndicate this afternoon- I'll suggest your tree, and TBH the thought of a visit to Brittany and more apples for cider might just be too much! Not sure how cost effective the cider would be...

HMK

[Millymollymandy]

Even if you lived in Brittany it would probably be cheaper and a damn site easier to just go and buy a bottle of it than make your own (unless you have all the equipment and can do it on a larger scale than the chuck it into a bucket and try to bash the apples about a bit sort of recipe - my OH looked at that and thought Naaaaaah!). Brittany and Normandy are two of the few non wine growing regions so cider is their thing hence it is cheap and plentiful - and of course locally made.

But the cider apples last a long time on the trees well into December and the birds love them so I am doing my bit helping the local wildlife. They are also very decorative trees with the small really red fruit.

[Millymollymandy]

Sadly pear jam was not to be - we've had a bad year for brown rot (moniliose) and the pears are all brown in the middle or browning or rotting on the outside from the stem down - have salvaged some bits and made a clafouti and eaten some bits of pears, but some are not very sweet whereas others (the bits salvaged) are still delicious. Lots have those rock hard scabby bits in the flesh too which I don't know what it is or what the cause is.

Oh well - it wasn't the worst year for brown rot (where we've had e.g. no plums or peaches at all cos they've rotted before ripening) but probably it was nature's way of preventing us from having too much of any one thing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that I am pressured to do things with windfall apples quicker than normal as they are rotting at a rate of knots and I just am so pushed for time as there is so much to do outside before it gets cold.