Tuesday 3 September 2013

Using what we've got

How many times do we go through our garden and think "Gee, I've got so much of that ... (insert fruit or vegetable) ... what the heck can I do with it?"
Believe it or not, we've had that situation with pawpaws this season.
We've never previously had much success with pawpaws here in the tropics, particularly in our dreadful clay soil.
But for some reason this year we've hit paydirt, so to speak.
There's been pawpaws aplenty, you could say. I reckon we've had probably 20, which is a bit of an issue when Baby TG&C doesn't fancy them. This boy eats almost every fruit known to man and woman-kind, but nope, not pawpaw. Well, hopefully it's a case of not yet.
So we can't dispose of them down his gullet.
Earlier this week we found ourselves in the situation of having picked four that were ripe with more still ripening on the trees.
What to do, what to do?
So thanks to Mr Google, we found a recipe that seemed to suit.
Now I would never have thought of this combination myself, but I tells ya ... it works!
And the other beautiful factor was that we could use so much of our own produce - our own edible ginger and our own bush lemon.
Now I've got a bit of a "thing" about bush lemons. I happen to think they're the best sort there is.
This is a bit of a relic from my youth I guess, when my folks had bush lemons "down the back creek". So every year when they were fruiting we would make a couple of treks down the back for a picking session.
This happened to coincide with the local country show and I know I won a prize at least once for "my" bush lemons.
Anyway, I have digressed, of course.
So here she is, the famous new recipe.

http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/pawpaw-and-ginger-jam-L9406.html

The ginger gives a nice surprising little zing and I really felt the lemon helped it gel, contrary to the recipe, which seemed to indicate it wouldn't happen.
Unfortunately I didn't have the blog on my mind when I was cooking so there are no shots of the jam in progress, but there are shots of pawpaws before and I've done you the service of taking some shots of the jam jars.
Enjoy!