Jam!

The red currants are ready! The process of picking them took me two and a half hours of sitting in the bush. Strand after strand of the things. We had about five small boxes and two massive ones. That was the first stage of the process but five more hours of stripping the berries off the racemes (!) I use a fork curved downwards into a bowl. It's RSI for the fruit picker if you ask me! After I'd done that over two evenings (Bio gas man did help for about 20 minutes.....) the berries were ready for a bit of a boil and a mash with a masher to start the juice process. BGM did help with this one. Then I got into jam mode but with the help of Marguerite Patten's 'Jams, Preserves and Chutneys'. I had 5 litres of juice in the end.... which menat that I added 4 kilos of sugar. I used a mixture of pectin sugar and normal sugar. I'm waiting for it to set now as its still cooling.
The grand total of 20 jars of jam is sitting in the dining room doing just that!