"We be jammin' man"

On my way home yesterday from taking the girls horse riding, I stopped in at a fruit shop for some bananas. I came across a box of fruit that was battered and bruised and was for sale at $2.50. I cannot resist a bargain, so I thought I would take it home and make what I could with it. Whatever can't be used in our house goes out to the chooks so I wasn't too worried if half of it was too far gone.

Here's most of it. We already had eaten a few pears and peaches that weren't too bad.

I spent most of the afternoon producing jams and sauce. There wasn't too much that had to go directly to the chooks, in fact the apples only had small bruises on one side.

I used a simple recipe; basically whatever the fruit ended up weighing, I added half of that to it in sugar  and simply added some freshly squeezed lemon juice. With the apple sauce I added a small portion of sugar just to sweeten the pot a bit and again some lemon juice.

2 jars Peach and Apricot jam, 4 jars Apple Sauce and 2 jars Nectarine jam

The Pig and girls have already taste tested the jams and apparently they are "delish". The girls are looking forward to having some apple sauce on their muesli tomorrow.


I still have the kiwi fruit and pears left so may make a crumble tonight (if my aching feet can stand in the kitchen any longer!) and I will just squeeze the mandarins and orange and have some juice with those few pieces.


Now at the beginning of this, I mentioned that I went in to buy some bananas, which I did. Well The Pig saw some banana's for 88c a kilo last night after his shift and not realising I had gotten some earlier in the day ... well, now we have about 20 bananas!!!


I mashed 4 of the ripest looking bananas and froze them in mini zip lock bags for later use in a banana cake or muffins.

2 mashed banana's fit perfectly in each.

Well that's it for now ... but I am quite enjoying all this preserving so don't be surprised if something else turns up on here real soon.