Berry Jams and Gin Cocktails

How do you handle things when your weekend goes completely off the rails? Some of my good friends like to salvage their weekend by cocooning at home, maybe with a good book or some decent movies and a bottle of wine or a few pots of coffee. Other friends like to go out and make the most of their weekend remaining time – taking a long hike alone somewhere to work stuff out, meeting up with crazy fun friends to forget about stuff, and everything between. Me, I kept my pre-existing lunch date with the crew. And after chatting with them for a two and half hours, I felt like I could go out on a scavenger hunt to gather the ingredients to make some berry jam.

The Scavenger Hunt

The scavenger hunt wasn’t a complete wild goose chase. Before I left the house for lunch, I checked my Eat Your Books recipe library for recipes for raspberry jam, because I knew from following my favorite local orchard on Facebook, that raspberries were currently in pick your own season. The library came up with 19 recipes, but two that really intrigued me. One was a Serious Eats recipe for Raspberry Rose Jam that required two pints of raspberries and no pectin. The other was a recipe from my preserving book for Raspberry Violet Jam, which required 1.5 kilograms of raspberries (a few ounces over three pounds) and “jam sugar” which had pectin in it. It also required either crème de violette or violet syrup. Rather than do any serious analysis or make any heavy decisions, I tossed both my preserving book and my canning book into the giant purse I was carrying and went off to meet the crew for lunch.

As our post lunch conversation was wrapping up, I realized the restaurant was near a Total Wines. If anyone was going to have crème de violette, it would be them. And I wouldn’t really be cheating on my small local liquor store because this wouldn’t be a purchase that I could make there anyway. Sure enough, way in the back of the store, they had TWO different varieties of French crème de violette, which is exactly what it sounds like it is – a violet flavored liqueur! I bought the less expensive bottle because all I was going to use it for was making jam and making Aviation cocktails, which are another favorite of mine. Of course, while I was searching the Wall of Cordials, I found the ever so elusive bottle of dry curaçao that I needed for the perfect Pimms Royale. I played the “Less Than” price game on that bottle and ended up grabbing it as well.

With the two bottles of liquor in my trunk, my next stop was the farm store at my favorite local orchard. I went with the thought of buying raspberries, and a back up plan of buying blueberries, because blueberries were pick your own in the fields as well. Well, the raspberries in the farm store were all Driscolls from California, so that was a no go. So right there in the store, I pulled the canning book out of my gigantic purse and started looking for the blueberry jam recipes. There was the awesome Blueberry Meyer Lemon Marmalade recipe that I had attempted last August, but I’m still kind of scarred by having to segment all those tiny Meyer lemons. There was also a Blueberry Apple Jam that looked promising. So I weighed a quart of blueberries, which was one pound twelve ounces (and that explains why I had so much waste on my strawberries – I only read the twelve ounces!!!) I put two quarts in the scale, and that weighed slightly more than the required three pounds, which meant I was good to go on blueberries. I picked up a few Granny Smith Apples, weighed those, and was good to go there. Check out was a friendly as always, and I was on to my next stop.

I was debating whether I really needed to go to the grocery store, since I would only be home for three days before traveling again. But I decided to go because I still needed milk for morning coffee and something healthy for lunch for the time that I was home. Of course, when I walked into the store, I was greeted by a sale display of beautiful raspberries!!! And then I had to break out my calculator to confirm that I knew how many twelve-ounce packages would make three pounds (four!). According to the book recipe, not the online recipe, the Raspberry Violet Jam required five cups of sugar and a 1.75 ounce box of pectin. I picked up an extra few pounds of sugar since I wasn’t sure how much sugar I had left after the last bout of jam making. And then came the Wall of Pectin – well, there were three choices of Ball Brand pectin and another two choices of Sure Jell pectin, so never having bought pectin before it seemed like a very daunting selection to me. Since the Sure Jell pectin was in 1.75 ounce boxes rather than large jars, I went with them. Then between their Original and their Low Sugar options, I went with the Original selection. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

The Fancy Gin Drinks

After I had put away all the perishables and made a plate for dinner, I had to decide whether to open the bottle of dry curaçao to make a Pimms Royale or to open the bottle of crème de violette to make an Aviation. Part of my plan with my nutritionist is that I would limit myself to four cocktails a week, so I actually had to choose which one I wanted more. I decided to relive our fun times in New Orleans with a Pimms Royale, and pulled out the clipping from the day drinking book that has been making the rounds of the ladies lately. The bottle of Pimms No. 1 was buried deep in the back of the liquor cabinet. The bottle of Tanqueray was not in its usual spot in the lefthand front corner of the cabinet, and instead was in center of the cabinet. Of course, the easiest thing to find was the baby bottle of prosecco in my refrigerator. That was flat, but I still used it. In fact, I used the whole rest of the baby bottle, which was way more than the two ounces that the recipe called for. That was probably a mistake. The drink was far more alcoholic tasting that I recall either the Pimms Cup at the Hermes Bar in New Orleans or the Pimms Royale during my Cava Cocktail testing in December. But I drank the whole thing anyway. Next time I’ll have to try it with either ginger ale or with prosecco that still has its fizz.

Since I was interested in keeping my promise to my nutritionist, I held off on mixing the Aviation until the next evening. But that gave me time to find a decent recipe for an Aviation since the one on Bar None Drinks just had gin, Maraschino liqueur, and lemon juice – no crème de violette! I did a Google search, which came up with what looked like promising results, but then I realized that I had entered several cocktail books into Eat Your Books. So I went there. I narrowed down the recipes to “Cocktails/Drinks (with alcohol)” and “Gin” and that returned 226 recipes from my books and blog sources. I sorted the recipes A to Z and, alas, between the “Auld Draper” and the “Bee’s Knees,” there was no mention of the Aviation Cocktail. Back to Good Old Google. I chose to go with the February 2017 Kitchen Swagger rendition of the August 2015 Pop Sugar recipe because I liked how the cocktail was thoughtfully written up. And I liked that the recipe had defined a ¼ ounce of crème de violette, rather than just “a few dashes.”

I employed all my usual shortcuts in the making of my Aviation cocktail. The recipe didn’t specify a particular type of gin, so I used the Tanqueray that I had on hand. Rather than squeeze one of the two lemons in my fruit bowl, I measured out the lemon juice from the bottle in my refrigerator. Of course, I didn’t skimp on using actual Luxardo Maraschino liqueur or actual Luxardo Maraschino cherries (one for the bartender and one for the drink!) However, I did save about seven dollars by buying the bargain crème de violette so my drink wasn’t the same vivid purple as the ones in the Kitchen Swagger photographs. And I skipped the whole “shake vigorously with a cup of ice for ten seconds” because I didn’t have any clean ice in my freezer. And I used my sole surviving coupe glass (its partner mysteriously jumped onto the tile floor in the middle of the night several months ago) rather than a martini glass. That just seemed more stylish.

Overall, I really enjoyed my Aviation cocktail. I would definitely repeat this recipe again because it was actually a very smooth easy drinking cocktail. Not at all like the Aviation that I had at Swig on the Riverwalk in San Antonio last November. Although that one was a very pretty purple, it was so strongly alcoholic tasting, it was almost like drinking gasoline. The Amelia Earhart that I had at Kingfish, down from K-Paul’s on Chartres Street in New Orleans, was actually pretty lovely. Kingfish made their version of the Aviation with Ford’s gin, fresh lemon, Luxardo Maraschino and the expensive crème de violette. But what truly made their drink stand out was that they muddled fresh basil into it. Definitely worth coming in from the rain and sitting a spell!

Raspberry Violet Jam

It took more than a moment for me to motivate after dinner to start the Raspberry Violet Jam project. All the pots, jars, and tools were already clean, so that wasn’t stopping me. The recipe was pretty straightforward: stir together the raspberries, lemon juice and pectin until the pectin dissolves; bring to a boil; add the sugar; bring to a boil; bring to the setting point; add the violet syrup; cool; and water process can. So that wasn’t stopping me either. What finally got me moving was the knowledge that I only had two nights left in the house, so I had to do something with all that fruit or else it would go to waste – again!

This was the first recipe that I made out of my preserving book, which is written in a different style than my canning book, so it took a little getting used to. First, the recipe yield was massive – twenty four-ounce jars of jam!!! I had to go into the garage and get the two extra cartons of jam jars that I was saving for a rainy day! I’ll need to stop at the grocery store tomorrow night to buy more jars for my blueberry apple jam project. Second, the recipe used pectin powder, which was a foreign substance to me. My canning book always used natural pectin from other fruits – especially apples and citrus – to supplement low pectin fruits. The general purpose of pectin is to help the jam jell better. This recipe used an entire 1.75 ounce box of the stuff, so I think it ought to jell pretty well! Finally, the recipe used almost two cups of sugar for every pound of fruit, which seemed like a ton of sugar compared to the low sugar recipes in the canning book.

The only quirk I found in the recipe instructions was that they said it would only take one minute of boiling hard with the added sugar to reach the setting point. I know that there is a highly intuitive wrinkle test that can be done to figure out whether your jam has reached its setting point, but I prefer the black and white of the temperature test. Even if it is annoying to continually have to stick your hand into the pot of molten lava to take its temperature. According to the introductory material of the preserving book (and everything else I know about jam making) the setting point of jam is 220F. Well, after one minute of boiling hard with the added sugar, my raspberry mixture was only at 215F. So I left it go another five minutes. It just barely reached 217F. So I let it go another five minutes. For one fleeting instant, I saw 220F on the thermometer. I was so excited that I turned off the heat, carefully stirred in the crème de violette, and proceeded with the recipe.

Quite curiously, out of the batch of eighteen jars (one was an eight ounce jar) there was actually one canning failure. One of my favorite steps in water process canning is going back to the jars about thirty minutes or so after they have been removed from the hot water and poking the lids. The lids are not supposed to click or give at all. They are supposed to stand pat. If a lid doesn’t, then that means that the jar didn’t seal properly and needs to be refrigerated immediately. Which is what I did with the errant jar. And perhaps it will be tomorrow’s breakfast, if my pitas haven’t gotten moldy.

Blueberry Apple Jam

I finally finished packing for a week away at 2am, and I still had two quarts of orchard blueberries and five orchard Granny Smith apples in my kitchen. I suppose the normal thing to do would have been to freeze the blueberries and put the apples in the refrigerator, both to await my return. But no, I figured two hours would be enough time to carry out my original plan of making a batch of Blueberry Apple Jam, in addition to finalizing preparations for departure.

Immediately, I topped off the water in the giant canning pot because I knew that thing would take a while to come up to a boil. (Spoiler alert: it took about an hour.) I cleaned the jam jars and set them aside to sit with hot water. Then I prepped the apples by peeling, coring, and chopping them. They were supposed to be diced, but I didn’t have the time or patience for fine knife skills at that hour of the morning. The curious thing about the canning book is that it relies on natural pectin to augment low pectin fruits, like berries, so the recipe had me reserve all the peels, seeds, and cores from the apples to tie into a cheesecloth as a little “pectin booster pack” to use in the jam making process. Finally, I washed and picked over the orchard blueberries. All that prep work took about 48 minutes. Not bad.

The recipe itself was super simple. The first step was to bring the blueberries to a simmer with the sugar to express enough juice to cover the berries. After working with the preserving book yesterday, it was a stark contrast how little sugar was involved in this recipe: just 1½ cups! Next the blueberry juice was drained off the blueberries and added back to the pot with the chopped apples and the pectin booster pack. Then comes the hard part: waiting for the syrup to reach its setting point at 220F. According to the canning book, it was only supposed to take 15 to 20 minutes, but, at 15 minutes, I was only reading 214F. This could throw off my entire game plan! Fortunately, it only took about another ten minutes to come up to temperature, which didn’t damage the plan too badly.

By some miracle, I had all the jam water process canned by about 345am. That gave me enough time to clean up some of the mess, get dressed for the day, move my luggage to the car, and get underway by 4am. So, of course, I had no problem making my 647am flight!

The Verdict

The Pimms Royale was disappointingly alcoholic tasting, although that may have been the fault of the flat prosecco rather than the brand new bottle of dry curaçao. The Aviation Cocktail wasn’t as purple as I would have liked, but it tasted delicious. I would definitely give the Pimms Royale another try with fresh prosecco and definitely keep the recipe for the Aviation Cocktail.

I couldn’t resist opening the jar of Raspberry Violet Jam that didn’t seal and ended up in my refrigerator. It was amazing! It almost tasted like raspberry candy. Of course, there were a ton of seeds, but that didn’t bother me. And curiously, the use of the pectin made the jam really jell nicely. Although there was a jar of Blueberry Apple Jam that was only half full and couldn’t properly be water process canned because it kept floating in the pot, I didn’t have the time to try it because I had to fly out the door! But both recipes were so straightforward that I would undoubtedly try them again.