the perils of homemade jam!!

Same with my yummy marmalade.
Shame you can’t make it without sugar.

Marmalade, jam, homemade biscuits, cakes etc. etc. or how about trifle?

Horribly tempting isn't it? And such fun to make as well.

I've been making gooseberry jelly - once opened .....
Perhaps I'll have to give it away.

Strawberry and gooseberry, a match made in Heaven.
Please send all surplus to requirements to ...... Cheshire.

Raspberry and gooseberry together? Not tried that one.

I’m addicted to making jams and marmalades.

Fatal isn't it? I've just started eating this year's strawberry.

I dont make jam anymore but have an nearly new preserving pan if anyone would like it.

In January I buy my Seville oranges, cut them up, squeeze out the juice, and freeze it all, as I don't like the kitchen getting all steamed up in the winter. I usually make the marmalade when it's warm and I can open the windows. Therefore I had planned to make some this week, but it's too blooming hot!!! Hey ho.

I’ve never heard of gooseberry jam! I have goosegogs in the garden and I usually just make pies and crumbles. Do you recommend?

Never heard of gooseberry jam?
A favourite especially in my childhood from our own goosegogs!

My mother always mixed gooseberries and strawberries to make a better set.
She never used certo or whatever it was called but strawberries on their own made a very runny jam.

Conserve! If it’s runny I call it conserve! I have used gooseberries to strawberry but usually add a few redcurrants and that too gives a good set. This year I had a couple of bags of white currants in the freezer and used them instead. Worked just as well. I’m like your mum*Ann*, I feel that using Certo is cheating!

The worst peril of homemade jam that I have ever encountered was when I was writing and testing recipes for a pressure cooker recipe book I was writing. That was a seriously hot summer and I was cooking in a bikini when the pressure cooker blew its vent, just as I was leaning over to a shelf. Serious blisters but probably not a likely problem for anyone else.

Ooh, slapped wrist for me of course it is conserve!!!?

My mother also made many pounds of blackcurrant jam every year as we had lots of bushes.
In her later years, everything went in,bits of stalk, the beardy ends and tiny unripe green ones.
We had to be very diplomatic when presented with a jar.

She used a "jam pan" her father had won in a village show for his prize vegetables circa 1900.

It is solid brass ,weighs a ton and when I inherited it I cleaned it up and took it to a local florist who filled it with a dried flower arrangement and it sits on my hearth.

Sorry absent, that must have been very painful, are you scarred, mentally and physically?.

Right now we are buying 5kg of sugar per week to support our jam-making habit.

Our first crop of tangy blackberry jam is ready for collection.

I've never made jam but I think I will have to give it a go now

I come from a long line of jam makers. Always remember my grandmother giving visitors a jar when they called and she never visited herself without taking jam or half a dozen eggs - proper Welsh farming hospitality! DH goes mad when I give mine away and he’s left with ‘Shop bought’!

My beautiful gd (7) made gooseberry jam at school! It's AMAZING!!! I am very very happy ?

Now I don’t make my own jam I buy a french one, St Dalfour which has no sugar apart from fruit sugars. I wonder how it is made? The storage time is less but it is so good that is no problem.

and this is why I have given up making jam and marmalade

Has anyone tried gooseberry and date chutney? I make a lot of chutneys, rhubarb and date is good too!

Thank you all, I'm salivating at the very thought of all the joys you mention here. I have a delightful neighbour who keeps me amply supplied with concoctions of every fruit imaginable. She doesn't have the resident consumers any more so shares her talent around. Bliss!

My main triumph this year has been elderflower cordial - litres and litres of the stuff and so cheap compared with the bought variety. Sugar, lemons, citric acid and everything else foraged for free - result!
And a first - I found some pink elderflowers which make such a pretty cordial. And a splash of it in a G&T make a very special drink.