MAKING These little muslin jam making bags hold the peel and pips of oranges, lemons, grapefruit and kumquats for jam making. Citrus fruit is low in pectin and the pips and skin are high, so including the bag of pips and some skin while the fruit cooks disperses the pectin, which is the setting agent.
These little bags are so easy to make. I cut a rectangle of washed and ironed muslin and sewed a hem along one of the longer edges.
Then I stitched the two open sides together, using zigzag stitch as the weave of the muslin is very loose.
Turned the bag inside out and sewed the two edges again in normal straight stitch. Then stitched cotton ties on the top seam and it’s done. A perfect pectin bag!
COOKING Soaked over a kilo of mixed fruit in sherry and brandy for about six weeks in preparation for the Christmas Cakes.
The first part of making the cakes is to line the cake tins with brown paper and then baking parchment paper. I hold it all together with pegs.
Next all the ingredients are mixed in a big bowl.
Each family member stirred the mixture and made a wish, then I poured it into the tins and decorated the top with almonds and cherries. I used to ice the cakes but not anymore. They cooked for nearly five hours and smelt wonderful the whole time.
GROWING I picked this pretty pink geranium from a friend’s garden to paint. I liked the colour so much I broke a piece off and planted it.
It’s growing well!
READING “Frieda, The Original Lady Chatterley”, Annabel Abb’s carefully researched but partly fictional account of D.H.Lawrence’s muse and wife was a fascinating snapshot of women’s rights and opportunities during the first half of the 20th century. Frieda, a German baroness by birth, marries an English professor of linguistics and moves to Nottingham, an industrial city with strict behavioural expectations which stifled her. She adores her children but feels suffocated by her marriage and lack of intellectual and sexual stimulation and sets out to achieve more.
( The book has a different cover overseas.) Frieda pays a dreadful price for her freedom. She loses contact with her three children until they are adults and lives within a toxic and erratic marriage with Lawrence. Frieda was a woman who refused to conform and was determined to be wholly her own person. A great read.
Also read Arundhati Roy’s “Ministry of Utmost Happiness”. I bought it because I’d really enjoyed her previous book, “The God of Small Things” but I found her new book so long and so distressing I struggled to stay engaged. Her wide ranging collection of characters and locales plus the constant and graphically described violence, all based on historical events, was finally too much for me. No utmost happiness for me!
The 7th of December is Pearl Harbour Remembrance Day. On the 7th of December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, the Headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet in the Hawaiian Island. This attack caused America to enter WW2.
The Japanese also attacked Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore the Dutch East Indies, the Philipines and the International Settlement in Shanghai at the same time, although the date on the other side of the international dateline was December the eighth.