Forgot to make strawberry jam when the berries were perfect? Oops — me too. And now we may have additional reasons to regret our grasshopper-like ways of ignoring the coming unfruitful season.
There is this, for example: we could be sweetening our iced tea with jam or jelly. I confess this possibility never occurred to me, but it occurred to Ana Sortum, Boston restaurateur. Her tea is not a locally sweetened thing, depending on Greek or Mediterranean apricot jam, plus fresh orange juice — but ours could be.
We have already celebrated Stella’s exquisite homemade local fruit/herb sodas. We could make our own with jams of different types.
And the cure for our failures to preserve early summer fruit: we can buy our way into jam heaven. Jennifer Gleason carries out the noble work of preserving fruit year-round (working from frozen fruit in winter) and we benefit from the beautiful, intensely flavored Sunflower Sundries jams and jellies she produces. I like the idea of blackberry-rosemary iced tea or soda made from Sunflower Sundries jam and my fresh rosemary. Or gooseberry-thyme, or peach-mint.
If you try this jammin’ idea, please report back!
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The world is coming to visit central Kentucky this year for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. To help our visitors know more about Kentucky’s food and food ways, Savoring Kentucky is rolling out 116 Savory Kentucky Bites, one for each of the 100 days before WEG begins, and 16 for the days during WEG, September 25 – October 10. Today’s Savory Bite is number 55.
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great ideas rona, we've been using our jam to sweeten our lemonade lately, and love the color it adds as well as the nice fruit sweet taste. we never waste any lemon peels, using them to make lemonade and floating them in the pitcher/jar. we also use our jam to fruitify and sweeten homemade whole milk yougart and ice cream.
Beautiful ideas, Jennifer. So appropriate and delicious with your fine jams. Thank you for sharing these tips.