Monday, June 5, 2017

Violet Jam

A boy in the grass picking flowers
June is a jam month for the Food in Jars Mastery Challenge and I need to be honest, I really wanted to challenge myself and jam was a hard one to find. Jam is my THING.... how could I take it up a notch?

Then I remembered that we had violets growing at the edge of the woods.  FLOWERS .... I could challenge myself by using flowers. It was a wonderful Sunday morning activity. With the help of Baby, we went foraging in the field for violets.
 
























It was an ideal Sunday morning, drinking my tea, sitting in the shady grass with my youngest picking flowers.






















I need to be honest here though one cup of packed violets is a hard earned venture, even Baby bagged out before I got them all. They almost camouflage themselves among the grass - you can only see them when you look at them from the right direction.

I love the swirl in the leaves. 























All in all, it took over an hour to procure one cup of violets but luckily that is all I needed because I picked every last one of them.




I used a recipe from  Soule Mama found HERE.  

I don't know if I did it right or used the right amount of pectin because my jam isn't as purple as hers. It also seems to have a grainy consistency. I would definitely make this again, but I might use natural pectin from apples. This was a nice experiment in foraging and I will tinker with it again. How many rounds of blooms do violets have in a season?
I Tweezed out any impurities

Ingredients
1 (packed) cup violet blossoms
1 cup water
juice of one lemon
1/2 cup honey
pectin (I used 1/3 of a box of Pomona pectin - turns out that 1/3 is 1 Tablespoon and 1 Teaspoon.)



































Process
1. Spend a lovely late spring morning with your youngest child foraging for violets. 
2.  Blend violets, 1/2 of the water and lemon juice.






















3.  Heat remaining water and honey in a saucepan. 
4. When warm, add pectin and stir until mixed well. 
5. Add pectin/honey mix to blender. Blend again until smooth. 
6. Place in hot jars immediately to set. This is a freezer jam for preserving.

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