November 01, 2007
The hunt for the Quince
I've been hunting high and low, far and close, to find these golden fruits. The quince is getting rarer here...I don't know about your area, but here it seems to have vanished from our markets. It has been weeks before I found some. Only last week end was I able to lay my hands on these, and I purchased the lot at the market stand. Only 3,6 kg, but it was the whole stock there was that day. My ambitions were targeting the 10 kg, getting higher and higher as the time went by. In the end, I was quite happy that I got much less. It seemed like forever to clean them, cut them in pieces, and so, this amount was good in the end.
I obtained quite a lot of juice, almost 3 kg. In retrospect, I think I was too generous with the water. But the recipe said *cover with water*, and I covered.
The first try I did to make out of this juice some gelly didn't *take*, and the resulting syrup didn't gelify at all. So today, I recooked it all, in 2 turns : the first was reduced and cooked, as long as it needed to *take* by itself. Nothing added, only the sugar in the first place. Quince and sugar.
To the second turn I added some lemon juice, and some apple pectine. This helped reducing the cooking time, like, a LOT. From One hour to 15 minutes.
On the left, Quince Juice + Sugar (+ Lots of cooking time)
On the Right, Quince Juice + Sugar + Lemon Juice+ Pectine.
Both are very good, I managed the dark one not to have a caramelised taste, and because of the longer reducing, it is sweeter and more tasty.
With the same amount of juice, I have 4 pots of the dark one, 5 1/2 of the light one. Some reserves for the autumn and winter. Yummy!
And the knitting? Well, it wasn't too bad this month, but I didn't manage all my october's targets.
All Season's Cotton? Not sewn at all...
I almost finished the sock, which is a hundertwasser vertical striped sock, but it looks horrible, and I do not think I'll finish it :
It hangs on my foot, and I fear it will never be fitting, even with a toe. I did the grafting of a gazillion stitches for nothing. Frog Pond here we come!
But I managed good knitting on the HK jacket :
I was very short on the dark green, and had only about one meter left : this maybe helped me boost the knitting a bit, because I wanted to know if I was going to have enough or not. Suspense helped me along there. I even did the 3-needles cast-off of the shoulders.
So in November I'll try
- To sort this hundertwasser sock pattern thing. I loved the look of these vertical stripes, it is only a pity it doesn't fit at all. I've seen an alternative here so I guess I am going to try this.
- Finish the HK jacket, because that would be great!!!
Do the finishing of 2 scarves which are waiting since a loong time, and another cardi in Cork I Just dug out. A WIPs galore...