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.


Monday, December 6, 2010

Olives

So I'm not sure if Olives are a fruit, I think they are, but either way they are seriously in season right now, and this weekend I spent some time with friends picking and processing. I've been seeing ripe olive trees on sidewalks all over town, so it is forager heaven. Olives are really, really, really easy to cure too. You basically just slit them and brine in salt water for a month, changing the water every week.

We had 4 trees, 1 hour of picking, 6 hands for processing (well, 2 of them belonged to a 2 and a half year old, so they maybe count as 50%--thanks for the help Simon Lev!) and we stuffed more than 6 half gallon jars with olives.
They'll take about a month to cure, and then another week or two to marinate. Here is the recipe I used last year. They were the best olives I've ever had!

Marinade: 1.5 C white wine vinegar, 1T salt dissolved in 2 C water, 1.5 t dried oregano, 3 lemon wedges, 2 cloves garlic, olive oil. (This is from about.com at http://homecooking.about.com/od/fruitrecipes/r/blfruit35.htm)

Check in in mid January if you'd like some!




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