Feijoa Jam

Feijoa & Ginger Jam.

Last week was a busy one in my business and I felt wholly in the flow of things. I am incredibly fortunate that I have the most wonderful clients. Clients who trust me with their creative projects, who value my opinion and who give me the freedom to flex my creative muscles whilst I am behind the camera, styling a shoot, buying props or in the kitchen developing a recipe.

Being a home owner (a privilege I am hugely grateful for) and the guardian (surely we can only be guardians of these beautiful pieces of land on which our homes sit) of two thirds of an acre, I also have plenty of opportunities to flex my creative muscles in our garden.

When we moved here 9 years ago we were lucky to inherit a variety of fruit trees as well as 4 raised garden beds. My children’s dad built a beautiful green house using windows and doors repurposed from the local primary school not long before we separated - a gift through which to nourish our children for which I will be eternally grateful. And whilst our land has been planted with a mix of natives and exotics around the boundary, there wasn’t a lot of ornamental planting and certainly no flowers aside from a pretty pink, heavily scented miniature rose called Cecil Brunner. When it first flowered it felt like a love song from my wonderful late grandmother as she used to send me back to boarding school with the prettiest bunch of Cecil Brunner roses throughout the summer terms.

And so it was, with a love for flowers and flower arranging, that I dove deep into the world of landscape gardening, removing scrappy ground cover, river stones and weeds to make way for heritage roses, vintage cottage flowers and natives. I spend much time pondering over the pairing of certain plants, their colours, textures and relative sizes. From one year to the next my gardens can look very different as I remove one kind of plant, or add another. Constantly tweaking, always evolving. And this year there is going to be more tweaking and evolving as there might previously have been as I have signed up to be one of the gardens in the Sustainable Backyards Trail. That however is a story for another day. And in the mean time I will share my recipe with you for feijoas & ginger jam before it really is too late!

Feijoa & Ginger Jam

Makes 7 small jars

6kg feijoas, peeled, roughly chopped (to yeild 3kg fruit)

1.5kg sugar

30g ginger, grated

Pre-heat your oven to 100°C. Wash 10 jars (it is always far better to wash too many than not enough!) with hot soapy water and put into the oven to sterilise. They need to be in there for 30 minutes as a minimum. Put the lids into a large heatproof jug and set aside.

Put the feijoa, sugar and ginger into a large heavy-bottomed preserving pot, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for about an hour, stirring frequently, especially as it thickens, to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pot. To test whether or not it is ready, spoon a small amount out onto a saucer and leave to cool. Drag your finger through the centre of the jam, if it stays on either side of the channel you have created you are ready to pot your jam!

Pour boiling water over the lids and pot the jam into the hot jars and seal the lids well. Label then store in a cool dark spot in your kitchen. I use roughly half the amount of sugar that jams normally require and with good sterilisation they keep for a year in our cupboard.