Preserving the harvest: grapes

See all those luscious grapes? That’s a fraction of the grape harvest here. We have three grapevines on the property, two of which we are trying to retrain onto a new arbor. But the third yielded the above grapes, and plenty more. They have seeds, so don’t make good raisins (at least I don’t think they do, but I just had an idea... I’ll try it, and let you know if it works!). But what you CAN do is make jam! So I did.

First, I used my fingers to get the skins off. I put all of that in a pan with about a cup of water, and boiled for five minutes. That made it possible to pass them through the food mill to get the seeds out. Then I ran the skins through the blender, and added them to the pulp, along with a packet of pectin, and boiled the tar out of ‘em. I packed it into eight jars, and processed in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Ta-da! Enough grape jam to last the year, for sure. Total time: about 2 hours.