Sniffling Saturday

I have a cold. A knock-you-flat, no-energy, even-spicy-Thai-food-doesn’t clear-your-fuzzy-head cold. A sneezing-so-hard-I-may-have-just-sprained-something cold. A so-zonked-I-can’t-think-of-one-coherent-thing-to-say-in-this-blog-post cold.

DP has it too. And he never gets sick. Especially not so sick that he cancels things on the schedule, which he did today, rainchecking a dinner guest invited for tonight until next week. Probably for the best, since the very thought of cooking anything beyond the most basic dinner makes me want to go lie down. To say nothing of passing this germ along to an unsuspecting visitor.

But after having sat aimlessly at the computer for a good chunk of time, when I had intended to do something productive (why, I don’t know), I thought I could at least share my latest successful jam-making experiment. I don’t have a recipe as such, because I kind of wing-it with jam-making nowadays. I followed my usual procedure (based on Julie’s jam without a recipe), using these components:

~8 green pears

~6 purple plums

raw sugar (half as much sugar as fruit)

lemon juice (~2 Tbsp/kilo of fruit, or ~1 Tbsp per pound)

a chunk of fresh ginger (~2.5 cm/1 in long), peeled and grated finely

generous sprinkles of cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg

I chopped and cored/stoned the fruit; I didn't peel it, but put it through my food mill when the fruit has softened completely. And produced Spiced Pear-Plum Jam – otherwise known as Autumn in a Jar. Perfect on toast on a chilly Canberra morning, and something for you northern types to file away for about five months from now.