SPRING FRUIT

Its a funny thing how this blog is so often on my mind. At the market this morning I thought about how little variety of local fruit there is this time of the year - stored apples and pears, oranges and not much else yet. Then I felt a blog post coming on and here I am, in the middle of this gorgeous day when I should be outside, in here writing about preserving. Such is life.

All those peaches, plums and apricots from my mother's trees and figs, nectarines etc from my brother's garden have sat in the cupboard, bottled, until fairly recently because we have been making our way through frozen red currants and blackberries, my mother's navel oranges and lots of other citrus from my garden and the Riverland as well as cheap, organic and local apples from Wilson's. Now there is a rush on eating them.

In the market I saw excruciatingly expensive and, no doubt tasteless, apricots, nectarines and mangoes all from far away and a rosy glow inside me reminded me of my secret bounty, ever diminishing however, at home. This is a short list of what Vacola has meant for us, not just in taste, health and filling up hungry boys but in memories of picking them - with my mother - clambering in under the bird nets and reaching up to get the best fruit which is always just out of reach, discovering another clump of ripe peaches, previously hidden under leaves and then smelling them all the way home in the car, carting them in to the kitchen and packing them away - like a jar of yesterday, preserved for the future.

Peaches in fruit juice

Pears in citrus sauce

Nectarines in white wine syrup

Figs in white wine syrup

Apricots in fruit juice

Stewed Plums in own juice

Then there are the jams: apricot, strawberry,plum, fig, cumquat marmalade, quince jelly, orange marmalade, grapefruit marmalade and maybe some others

Chutney - peach and date

Olives - 2 different ones this year

Plum sauce, tomato sauce and usually buckets and buckets of pasta sauce or just tomatoes.

Probably other stuff I have forgotten about because its all gone now.

I am not trying to say how great I am but how grateful I am for all time I have and the chances I have been given to live this way. But that's another story...