Carissa Jelly!

Did you know that there's a plant called Carissa? It's a shrub grown in more tropical regions than PA. How exciting is that!?

 The couple we were visiting in Florida have Carissas around their pool. The fruit it produces is called a Carissa or a natal plum. They're small and reddish pink with a taste that's somewhere between strawberry and cranberry. Apparently the rest of the bush is poisonous.

They froze the fruit that ripened over the last few months so that we could make jelly.

We cooked the fruit to soften it...

...and then mashed it on mesh so that the juice came through. The mashed stuff wasn't too pretty.

After adding lemon juice and sugar, we stirred for 20 minutes until it thickened and "sheeted" off the spoon. It was such a pretty, frothy pink!

 

Behold - Carissa jelly!

It's just so pretty and pink! We had the bit that didn't fit into the jars the next morning for breakfast.

It tasted sort of like strawberry jelly, but it was more tart. Mmmm! I couldn't bring a jar back because we were carrying our luggage onto the plane, but they're bringing me one when they drive up next month.

Carissa Jelly

adapted from the Tropical Fruit Cookbook

Make 2 jars + some for snacking!

2 cups Carissa fruit, whole

water

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/4 cup orange juice

Wash Carissas and place in a medium saucepan. Cover with water. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 12-15 minutes or until fruit is soft. Strain juice through a mesh strainer into a large saucepan. (Make sure it's WAY bigger than you think you need. It bubbles and foams while cooking.) Mash fruit and let drain. Stir in sugar and lemon/orange juices until dissolved. Heat mixture on high and maintain a rolling boil, stirring constantly.  Cook for 15-20 minutes or until the mixture starts to thicken and sheets off the spoon. Remove from heat and pour into sterilized jars. Let gel and then screw lids on tightly. Even without officially canning it, the jelly should last for several weeks. (Since this batch only makes 2 jars, it didn't seem worth going through the whole canning process!)

Tomato chaos

Somehow when planting 6 tomato plants I did not think I was going to have so many tomatoes. My garden went crazy this summer, and the tomatoes are no exception!

This plentiful supply of green tomatoes came about because the plants were so out of control that we had to take action. I went out to pick them and couldn't even get to the middle of the plants. They had spread across the lawn and the grass was growing up through and around the tomatoes. My husband came to the rescue (as usual) to help me contain the mess, but we ended up knocking off a lot of unripened tomatoes in the process.

I researched recipes for these green tomatoes, determined not to be eating Fried Green Tomatoes every night for the next two weeks. There were some tasty looking ones, like Green Tomato BBQ Sauce, Green Tomato Pizza, and Green Tomato Salsa. And then there were some strange ones, like Green Tomato Bread and Green Tomato and Raspberry Cobbler, both of which might be good but it's hard to get past the idea of those combinations.


My grandma (who lives on a farm and grows all kinds of everything) saved me from all of this by suggesting that if I lay them out down in the basement, they'll ripen slowly. That was worth trying just because it seems so bizarre. It doesn't make much sense that in the dark and cool basement they would just magically change colors. We're talking about rock hard, pure green tomatoes here. A week later I was down getting an onion and guess what! There were 4 red tomatoes sitting there. Just goes to show that farmers know their stuff.

Next step was learning to can. For every one of those hard green tomatoes I had at least 3 ripe ones.

The first batch went toward a fresh tomato sauce, netting 1 excellent pasta dinner and 4 containers to freeze.

Mom helped with the second batch I learned to can, and we got 8 pints of diced tomatoes and 4 pints of juice. I swore as a child that I was never going to can. I'd watch my mom slaving away over the stove, tomato juice dripping everywhere and just knew that there was no reason for someone to be doing that. Now, confronted with all of these beautiful tomatoes, there's no other option. I can't let them rot! And there's no way I'm going to be able to eat all them all right now. Plus the homegrown, vine-ripened type are the very best.  Oh, and we threw in 4 pints of peaches while we were at it.

The third batch got turned into sauce. Sadly, after over an hour of prep (20 minutes of cooking, time to strain out the seeds and skins, and cooking down the sauce,) we made only 4 pints of sauce out of 4 baskets of tomatoes... There's really no justice in that.  

It won't be long before there's a fourth batch, with no end in sight.