So after yesterday’s excellent day’s foraging I ended up with some of the fruit left over.

So I decided to have a day making stuff and seeing what I could produce.

First up was the haws, decided to follow Huw’s recipe he got from the Really Wild food festival.

First step, stew the haws in water and vinegar.

While they were stewing I cut up 3Kg of crab apples I had foraged on the Friday, to make some crab apple jelly.

By this time the haws had stewed down into a nice mush and it was time to force them through a sieve.

to produce a nice thick orangey liquid.

Sugar was added to this as well as various seasonings and boiled down to a thick sauce.

I also boiled up a mixture of the bullaces, sloes, damson, blackberries and elderberries for a hedgerow jam.

Once the apples had stewed down into a mush,

thay were transferred to a muslin bag and allowed to drip for a while.

More to come on the apples later….

The hedgerow fruits were also strained through a colander to remove the pips, skins and stones.

Again sugar was added and the result boiled till the setting point was reached.

So far we have a fabulous haw sauce that reminds me of HP fruity sauce and goes really well in a bacon sarny,

a hedgerow jam of a marvelous colour and that’s sweet but not too sweet…

seen here alongside a glass of last year’s blackberry wine…

and still to come, turning the apple juice into jelly and whatever happened to the damsons….