Sunday Jelly

What is a girl to do when she sees an underutilised, overabundant crab apple tree in a garden with no one but the birds paying it any attention?

Well, when life gives you crab apples, make crab apple jelly.

I've never made such a thing before, but on a grey and drizzly Sunday, with the Internet as my sous chef, I attempted to construct something from a fruit I was about 95% sure was crab apple.

After weeding out all the bad apples, I sat the entire population on the stove in an excellent jam making pot I happened upon in the back of a cupboard.


I boiled the lights out of them and then strained the juice through an old (but super clean) white shirt which had been retired.


I then added more sugar than you'd ever care to know and boiled the juice which looked remarkably like dirty dish water until slowly it clarified and began to seem a lot more like a crab apple jelly I know and trust.

Eventually I carefully poured the liquid into the identical little jam jars I bought from the funny little DIY store just down the road.

I then spent the rest of the day feeling so ridiculously proud of myself that you'd have thought I'd just split the atom.