how do you like THEM apples

Hazel's parents have an apple tree in their back garden. And a highly productive one it is too, by the look of it, as she brought me a big bulging carrier bag of apples at the weekend. We cooked some with some pork chops on Sunday evening, I made some into an apple crumble on Monday, and I gave some away to my friend Robin who had some apple crumble ambitions of his own.

That still left, however, somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of apples to be used. I was a little at a loss, frankly, until I leafed through a cookery book to discover a recipe for apple and mint jelly. For which the ingredients are: apples, sugar and mint. Well, surely nothing can go wrong with a recipe as simple as that.

So....


You start by coarsely chopping up the apples, bunging them in a big pan, adding enough water to cover them, and bringing them up to a simmer until the fruit softens (or in my case, as I left them to go and do something else, disintegrates).



Then you drain the whole mushy juicy lot through a muslin bag into a convenient receptacle.

Luckily I already have a muslin fruit-straining bag from my sloe gin-making activities (you'll see it again on a blog post near here in January or February when I decant the sloe gin).

The idea is you leave this overnight until all the last juicy goodness has drained out of the apple goo, then boil it up again with some sugar, chop up and bung in some fresh mint and pour it into jars and leave it to set.



In theory it should end up looking like this. We'll see....

If anyone's expecting Christmas presents from me this year, by the way, I may have 20 or so jars of apple and mint jelly to get rid of around mid-December....