which_chick | (no subject)

As I may have mentioned earlier, the grapes didn't do jack this year. Some years the grapes (concord blue grapes, the same damn grapes that everyone else in the area grows) do really well and some years they don't do jack. This was a jack year. Last year they did lots. I don't ever really do much with the grapes except look at them along about the beginning of September to see if they're ripe yet, so the way I figure it, any grapes are a win.

Usually, when I go to make grape jelly, I throw the grape jelly directions from the nice people at Sure-Jell right out the window. This is because they do it wrong.

As long-time readers are aware (we go over this every fall about grape time), I do my own thing with the grapes.

I make grape jelly that contains no water, is slightly cloudy, and DOES NOT have the annoying-as-hell problem of "big globs of unmashable jelly cluttering up the toast" -- this may not be something you have ever seen as a problem but it drives me batshit. In my world, jelly should spread out smoothly and thinly in an even and (above all) uniform layer overtop of the toast, muffin, biscuit, or other jelly-able surface... and that's how my grape jelly behaves. Most store-bought jelly, made to a different set of standards that encompasses things like sparkling clear and firm, is unsuitable for my purposes and honest-to-dog, I'm bitchy enough before breakfast that I don't need to be fighting with unreasonable fruit spread products.

(Most store-bought jam is also problematic because the fruit lumps are too large. Strawberry jam, in particular, has the lumps-of-fruit problem. Damn stuff looks like a jar full of mouse abortions or something. I can't be having with that. I planted the fucking strawberry plants this spring so that I could get strawberries to attempt to address the strawberry jam fruit lump problem, but given how beleagured the strawberry plants are, my odds of a crop next summer are pretty minimal.)

Anyway, this year there were not enough grapes for my usual method of generating appropriate grape spread product. There were very few grapes, not enough for a single full batch. I wasn't going to throw them out, of course, and I wasn't going to *eat* that many concord grapes. I eat like three or four a year, which is plenty for eating plain. I do not like them plain. I like them as the spreadable grape product that I refer to as jelly even though it really isn't very jelly-like. So, I got the grapes and I picked 'em and I mashed the hell out of 'em with a potato masher. After cooking the grapes a bit, I removed the seeds and skins from the rest of the stuff with a food mill. That worked amazingly well and left me with a pretty thick, soupy grape thing. I measured the grape thing, added sugar in an equal volume (like four cups of grape thing, four cups of sugar) and cooked it for a while. It wasn't jelling as much as I thought it should so I added some pectin until it started to look pretty close to right.

I don't know how solid it'll set up, but it tastes... better than the usual run of grape product. I am pleased. There are three pint jars of it on my counter. One is for me. One is for La's husband. One is for NYR's husband. All in all, things could have been worse with this year's grapes. I learned a lot and developed a new grape technique.