Buttered Toast & jelly is part of my breakfast every morning. If we cook biscuits for dinner then I want butter & jelly with them. My dad was the same way.
I keep three varieties in the fridge, Grape & Plum jelly and Strawberry Preserves. I’ll usually alternate each morning.
Sometimes I buy Apple instead of Plum jelly. But there’s always three kinds of jelly in my fridge.
My grandmother made wonderful jelly. Fig preserves from her backyard tree. Several wild berry jellies. I miss those homemade jellies.
I voted two, but I’m guess neither are really edible at this point and will be tossed next time we clean the fridge. I like jam in general, and raspberry preserves in particular, but never (less than once a year) consume any.
Keeping it there isn’t even necessary (they’re called “preserves” for a reason), it’s just that the fridge is in the incredibly-tiny kitchen and the pantry is not. An advantage of an incredibly-tiny kitchen is that you can pop the toast, prep it, eat it, leave the knives in the wash and put the ingredients back in place without walking more than one step at a time… there isn’t room for more than one step at a time
I’m a jammin’ fool. Any time I have a handful of “extra” fruit, be it over- or underripe, sour, superfluous to requirement for another recipe, etc., it gets jammed. Yesterday I made whisky peach jam with about nine peaches from the supermarket that were ripening up too sour to enjoy eating out of hand. Oh, and I put in a few handfuls of tiny yellow plums that I scrumped off the Stanford campus. For pectin
So there’s two jars of that, a jar of cherry rhubarb, a jar of orange-Meyer lemon-marjoram marmalade, a few jars of last year’s tomato onion relish…
Despite the current riches of jams, I am out of bread. So I had cheesecake for breakfast
One. Blenheim apricot preserves from our local stone fruit orchard. Once I ran out of them, and tried some supermarket apricot preserves, but they tasted like orange colored jello with a faint hint of apricot in the background.
Maybe I’ll have to try making some of my own this year, if the apricot crop is good.
I have never liked jam, or anything fruity like that, but somehow I acquired a taste for red pepper jelly. So much so, that I make my own now, and there is at least one in the fridge, possibly two because the opened one got shoved to the back and I just grabbed a new one out of the pantry rather than dig for it.
There may be a tiny jar of some kind of jam that someone gave me as a gift many years ago in the door of the fridge. If I think about it, it’s going on twenty years, and it may be time to toss that one.
Looks like we have three right now. Last week, it would have been four. I’m not entirely sure where they’re all from, as I don’t really eat preserves, but with a couple kids in the house, always good to have around, I guess. We have strawberry, rose hip, and apricot preserves. (We usually also have grape, but I guess that ran out.)
Strawberry, huckleberry and orange marmalade. The only time they ever get used is when we have toast at breakfast, and that is only when we do a full fry-up. Once every couple of months, maybe.
One. Guava jam, homemade by my wife’s ‘aunt’ who isn’t actually family, but might as well be. Once or twice a year, when we go down to Florida, she sends us back with a 12-pack of homemade preserves. Usually some strawberry jam, some guava jam, and some strawberry-guava jam, which is the best jam ever. Even better than those kumquat-calamondin preserves that my wife’s grandmother used to make.
I have distant memories of buying jelly and jam in the grocery store, but we haven’t had to resort to that in time out of mind.
I thought they were called ‘preserves’ because the canning process both sealed the jar, and was hot enough to kill any bacteria inside the jar. So they would stay good for many years, as long as you didn’t open the jar.
But once you open it, all bets are off. Stuff can get in, and jam is a wonderful medium for stuff to grow on. Unless you go through a jar of jam in a matter of days, ‘refrigerate after opening’ is good advice.
3 in the fridge right now. Blackberry, Strawberry, and orange marmalade.
I love to make jelly/jam/preserves. I mostly eat blackberry. I just heard that black raspberries are ripe so I’ll be picking this weekend. Yum!
