Wednesday, October 1, 2014

A Wild Surprise of a Different Nature

Son of COG came home from work the other day and said, 'I've brought you a surprise. 'That's good,' I said -  'as long as I don't have to feed it or clean up after it.'   He laughed  said, rather doubtfully,  'maybe the second.'

It turned out to be 2 large bags of wild grapes- 12 pounds of them, after they'd been cleaned.  I haven't made jelly lately, only jam, so I found a recipe for wild grape jelly on the internet. It was a bit of work, but it made 11 pints of wonderful jelly.   Wild grapes have plenty of pectin, but you have to use so much sugar to get it to gel that my recipe advised using a low sugar pectin to bring out the wonderful flavor.  This is not Welches Grape Jelly, it has a complex almost wine-y flavor that would even go well with meat.  And it's pretty good with freshly made bread and a cup or tea, too.