mmmm feijoa's
That annual glut of fruit that kiwi's wait all year for and then spend ages trying to come up with good uses for them. Usually we use them as a substitute for apples or bananas in cakes, muffins, pies and so forth.
We usually get them for free from the abundant feijoa trees in backyards. If, by some slim chance to twist of foul luck, you don't have one, then a neighbour will usually have several producing enough fruit to keep a small town well supplied.
I have bags of them from my parents trees. I have been making smoothies, crumbles (crisps), chutney, porridge as well as eating them by the spoonful.
Right now I am experimenting with making fruit jelly, not the gelatine faux fruit flavoured muck you get in packets that contain nothing more than sugar, gelatine made by boiling down the leftovers from the butchery, iridescent artificial colour and synthetic flavouring reminiscent of cheap scented crayons (mmm doesn't that just make you want to run down the the supermarket and get some right now!!!)
I'm talking about extracting juice from fresh fruit, straining through muslin, adding sugar, and voila, home made feijoa jelly.
While I've made plenty of jam before, I have never made jelly, so I currently have a muslin bag full of feijoa pulp hanging from a cupboard door handle merrily dripping into a carefully position bowl. Hopefully the drips will drop where they are supposed to so I don't have a massive mess to clean up.
Then it will be time to bottle and seal the seasons bounty.
This years recipes are a plain feijoa jelly, soon to be joined by a vanilla feijoa jelly, flavoured with bay leaves and lemon zest.
Photos, and hopefully success stories, to follow.
