As a child I used to enjoy walking up and down country lanes near where I lived foraging blackberries from the hedgerows. My grandmother used to make classic blackberry jam and the entire process was a part of the autumn feel. More than 40 years later it still is, though now I get to do the foraging close to my own house.
Blackberry jam is lovely and I’ve made blackberry plus other fruit jams in the past, but this weekend I wanted to do something that was a little different. I’d been looking for “spicy” options for jams and chutneys and came across an interesting Spanish recipe for “mermelada de mora y manzana” which had a nice combination of common spices. I had to go out and do a bit of foraging to get enough blackberries to make the jam viable – making two tiny pots of jam would be a bit mad!
I’ve been purging my kitchen cupboards of old and out of date herbs and spices, so I only had the dregs of some old cloves and star anise – essentially everything was shattered, so the end result includes the spices, as I couldn’t remove them. I really need to use some kind of spice bag for that kind of seasoning in the future, so that’s yet another lesson learnt.
Getting the blackberry to soften was easy, but the apple proved a little awkward. In the end I had to use a potato masher to try and get it to break down and the result was then pretty good:
The end result doesn’t have much visual trace of the apple:
Apparently this kind of jam should gain flavour as it ages in the jar, so hopefully the star anise and cloves will improve the flavour and not overpower it. I tasted it last night and it had a lovely dark and rich depth to it.
At the top of this post there’s an AI generated image. Why? I shot a bit of video of the jam cooking:
For some reason there’s an option on youtube to create other video content “inspired” by the videos you have uploaded and of course some of it is AI generated. And that’s where the image came from. I am playing with AI for helping me to “run” my meal planning and I am curious with the various aspects that AI and content have.
I’ll be making some more jams and possibly some chutney over the next few days and weeks depending on what fruits I can get. It’s a fun way to spend the evening, though you then have to find some way of getting rid of all the produce, but that’s a fun issue to have!
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