Bon appetite

Remember the quinces? Whilst I did use my best endeavours to leave them languishing in a bag in the bottom of a dark cupboard, a couple of weekends ago I had time to pull them out and set about turning fruit into jelly.

The great thing about quinces is that you don't have to do any peeling or coring or anything complicated, just wash off any remaining fur and pop them in the pan. I had about 1 3/4 lb of chopped quince to which I added 1 1/2 pints of water and a tablespoon (ish) of lemon juice (shamefully the sort from the squeesy lemon not a real one because that's what I could find in the kitchen).

When I'd simmered that and strained it off through the sift I popped the pulp back into the pan with another 3/4 pint of water and gave it another 30 mins.

I had just over a pint of juice so I added enough sugar to rot your teeth and set about the stir-bubble-test-rinse and repeat dance until I thought that it was almost setting, which for me is a good sign that we've reached the illusive setting point.

Et voila:

Quince jelly. Made by my own fair hand. It is delicious and I heartily recommend it. We had roast duck the night I made this jelly (special offer in Sainsbury's) and while I was stirring I was mopping up the test dribbles with shreds of duck which is a really excellent combination that I would not have thought of unserendipitously.

In my continual stream of parcel post (more on that another day), yesterday's post brought another foodie gem:

This is my Christmas pudding, lovingly hand made by my mother (as she does every year), as H isn't into anything involving dried fruit. It's too cute for words, but perhaps you need some scale:


Christmas in miniature - perfect.

In the Christmas knitting news I have three socks. None of them match. Not all of them are for Christmas. The conundrum can only be solved by more knitting - gosh what a shame!