Mary Oliver

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?"









Thursday, August 12, 2010

Pretty Pear Preserves

No baby blanket photos today as I decided to make more pear preserves. Other than yesterday, I hadn't made preserves for about twenty years I'd guess. And I'd forgotten how satisfying it is to take fruit and turn it into something worthy of gifting. Of course I do that with yarn all the time, but this is pretty cool too.


I linked to the recipe yesterday, but let's do a mini-tutorial*, shall we?

First off, I decided to double the recipe, so I could have plenty of preserves, since I had plenty of pears, with more just waiting on the tree.



I used all of these pears, except one.


Chopped pears, lemon juice, fresh ginger, and crystallized ginger, ready to go.



After you mix the sugar, water, lemon juice, lemon zest, and fresh ginger, you must bring to a boil and then let it simmer for 10 minutes.



After adding the pears and crystallized ginger, you have to simmer just at boiling for about 45 minutes (!).




Doubling the recipe made a dozen of the tiny jars and two of the pint jars. Yum, yum.



Isn't this little jar so cute? Just right for a small gift.


Note: This isn't a real tutorial because I didn't say anything about preparing or sealing the jars.



Now I'm going to take a stroll on the beach with my sweetie, and then I plan to flop on the couch and continue seaming up the baby blanket squares! I'm looking forward to it.

3 comments:

  1. The ginger/pear combo sounds heavenly. I can imagine how wonderful your kitchen smelled - and the samples tasted.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yum! It sounds delicious. One of these days, I'll learn how to preserve foods. I never learned, even though my mom and my grandmoms used to do this. My brother still does, though he's a chef. Perhaps I'll have him teach me.

    Happy sewing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. You earned that knitting time. Canning scares me. It just seems like such a long and complicated process!

    ReplyDelete