Chokecherries

This week has been filled with the picking, washing, processing and putting up of chokecherries.

My sweet neighbors allowed us to pick the chokecherries from their tree. They lent us their juicer and even gave us her mother's jelly and syrup recipes. I am so glad that they shared this heritage with us!

This is a steamer:

The fruit your juicing goes into the top and water goes into the bottom.  As you heat the water, the fruit is steamed and the fruit juices drip into the middle compartment. I juiced our chokecherries for about 8 hours. I could have juiced for another day, but I was ready to make my jelly and wanted to return the juicer.

The jelly recipe I follow called for:

• 3 cups juice
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 4 cups sugar
• 1 package of pectin

Her recipe didn't call for processing. She said just to made sure the lids seal and they'd be fine. That my friends is crazy town and never never never going to happen at my house!  I know her family and her mother's family have been surviving this for about 100 years. But that, like I said, is so not happening here.

So I processed the all my chokecherry batches in a water bath for 15 min.

I doubled the recipe for the 1st batch and ended up with 12 1/2 pints of delicious, but pretty thin jelly. It was more like syrup really.  So I did a little on line research and found that by adding 1/2 cherry juice and 1/2 apple juice the jelly would set better. So that is what I did for round 2.  That batch gave me 4 1/2 pints of VERY jelled jelly.

I had just enough juice at that point to put up a batch of Pioneer Chokecherry Syrup. (4 pints)  I found this recipe in a Wyoming pamphlet on putting up wild fruit.

• 4 cups chokecherry juice
• 4 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 tsp cream of tartar

Before this week, I had never even seen a chokecherry, let alone tasted it's jelly or syrup. This jelly is so incredibly delicious.  It is so so yummy in a very unique way. I hope to add chokecherries to our yearly canning list.

Canning Dry Beans

This weekend, Shane and I put up 7 quarts of kidney beans. Note: Before I started canning my dry beans I would be forever deciding I wanted beans for dinner too late to get them soaked and cooked. This way they are ready to go any time I want them.

Last time we processed beans, we followed the instructions in the Blue Book, and ended up swimming in par boiled beans. The recipe calls for 2 1/4 a pound dry beans per quart.  That is way Way WAY to much!!!

This time we did 3/4 a pound per quart and still had too many beans, but it wasn't nearly the disaster that the last time was.

I'd like to get another batch done this week. I think I'll go with 5 pounds for 7 quarts. We'll see how it goes.