Welcome to 510 Fruits

510 Fruits came into existence because I love fruit and foraging and jam making. I love the bounty of seasonal produce and I came to love canning and jam making when I learned how hard it is to actually use all the fruit from a tree when it ripens. After processing my own backyard fruit, I began to see fruit everywhere I went. Thus the initiation into forage. Foraging in my neighborhood has taught me about the often overlooked bounty of our streets and backyards and has been a great way to meet neighbors, build community, and more efficiently share in the season's offerings.

As my love of fruit and jam has become an obsession, the stack of jam in my house has grown to waist high and wobbly. I realized I needed a way to get the jam out of my house as fast as I seem to be making it. Thus 510 Fruits and this attempt to share the variety of locally foraged and harvested fruits I have made into jams, marmalades, fruit butters and canned. Selling is not about making money, but just about covering the cost of jars and ingredients so that I can go on making more jam.

On the label, the byline "local forage" means the fruit is foraged from my yard, friends' and neighbors' yards, and streetside. The byline "local harvest" means I picked the produce at a local u-pick farm. Names also include more specific information, usually the street name of where the fruit originated.


Thursday, December 10, 2009

Ode to Lemons

Today was Lemon Day. (And that doesn't mean it was a lemon of a day!) After patiently waiting and watching for weeks, I finally deemed I had a quorum of ripe lemons on my tree. I harvested a large grocery bag full and spent the afternoon zesting and juicing.




An improvised double burner cooking lemon curd in front, and a pot of candied lemon peel in the back. First I piloted two different lemon curd recipes, then I did the big batch. Learning: the more egg yolks the better. Yolks keep it thick and creamy after it's been reboiled.

Yield: 18 jars of lemon curd and 3 cups of candied lemon peel

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