When Life Hands You Crab Apples, Make Jelly

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Hodding.

I’m afraid this is going to be a bit rambling.  I started out last week all excited.  Lisa and I madly created this site and I wrote my first blog until 1 am Tuesday–putting aside everything else on hearing of Gourmet’s demise.  I was swept up in the euphoria one gets from doing something new, but as the week progressed I grew ever more morose and decidedly less euphoric:  I was out of a job.  In fact, I was out of the only real job I’d had all year.  Writing about being frugal–and getting paid for it–had been a lifeline and a focal point.  No more.  (Making matters worse was the fact that two software/website-designing friends, Mike Ross and Carl Trapani, took hours out of their non-spare time to help make the site look better.  Mike, in fact, loaded all my old columns/blogs from the old Gourmet site, even.)

Yes, we were being frugal because we had to be.  And I was writing about being frugal because I often/almost always write about the big undertakings in my life.  And, deciding to stop eating out and doing things like reusing a coffee filter 42 (43?) times and eating roadkill and raising chickens and going twenty-something days without spending any money (beyond paying old bills) is definitely a big undertaking.  But now what?  If I’m not getting paid for this and don’t feel right about trying to turn this into a commercial blog/website because I’d rather contribute to your frugality then what am I left with?

Being frugal.

That’s why I found myself bending 18-foot tall crab apple trees to eye-level so Lisa could snatch off as many crab apples as possible in the limited amount of time I could hold the trees down.  No, we’re not so desperate that we’re feeding the kids  crab apples but instead, we’re making jelly and canning it for our own consumption and to give away as presents.  Bending the trees down, therefore, was filling two needs at once: being frugal and keeping physically toned.  In fact, given how hard it was to hold them down after a minute or so, I’d recommend the exercise to anyone whose triceps need a little firming up.

It’s amazing how good crab apple jelly is.  I hadn’t bothered tasting it since I was a kid because I’d always been more than happy to shell out for store-made or farm-made jam, jelly and preserves.  There’d been no need.  What a shame.  It’s so good even my non-preserve-eating teenage girls like it.

Lisa found about six, conflicting recipes from various sources, including, among other places, the back of the box the jars came in, online, and the old Joy of Cooking (we couldn’t find canning in the new one but I bet if they were to release an all new version now like they did in 1997 [yes, it’s been that long] they’d include it; our local hardware store said they’d hadn’t sold anywhere near this year’s amount of canning supplies in many, many years).  Some recipes said you didn’t need to sterilize the jars, others suggested 20 minutes and yet others demanded 15 minutes before filling and 10 more after to seal them properly.  So, after trial and error and doing enough research to understand what each step was for, she went with sterilizing the jars for 10 minutes, washing the lids and not dipping them in the boiling water so as not to harm the rubbery seal, and then finishing them off in a boiling water bath for 10 more minutes–or long enough to have a vacuum seal.  You can tell if they’re properly sealed, we now understand, by pushing on the lid with your finger.  If you can’t depress it, then it’s probably properly sealed.  That’s just for making jelly.  It’s different for jams and preserves.  Of course.

Making the jelly was the easy part.  She boiled the crab apples (8 cups with enough water to cover the apples), for 10 minutes and then strained the juice through cheesecloth, being careful not to mush it or it will be cloudy.  Next, she brought this juice, about 4 cups, to a boil, added 3 cups sugar and reheated it to between 222 and 225 degrees over a medium high heat.  You can just stop at this point, like we did, but then you’ll have some jelled jelly and some liquid jelly, which, I guess, isn’t really jelly.  If you simmer it at this heat for a while longer, say 5-10 minutes for 4 cups of crab apple pre-jelly liquid, then nearly all of it ends up being jelly when cooled.  It also gets darker and tastier the longer you’re willing to cook it.  The cool/frugal thing about making crab apple jelly is that you don’t need to add pectin to thicken it.  In fact, some people make their own pectin from crab apples to use in other preserves.

I still can’t get over how tasty it is.  Here… smell.  Taste.  Good, huh?  And Lisa’s jelly looks so wonderful because she simmered it much longer than she had to, making it darker red and stronger tasting than it might otherwise have been.

Of course, it’d be a whole lot better if other members of our family besides Angus and me used jelly, jam, etc.,  but it’ll make beautiful presents in the short, wide jars Lisa recently found on sale.  Which brings me to the point of this blog (finally, some might say): one of the great things about being frugal is all the wonderful, low-cost, hand-crafted presents you come up with.

And here’s a boast for the ages:

Frugal people make great lovers (if you define a lover as someone who gives thoughtful, homemade presents to his/her friends, that is).

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