Jam & Jelly

Mongrel plums that birds have seeded behind my Marin County home provide a rainbow of fruit for jamming. It was a rare good year, and I blended them all. I made a small amount of this last year and it sold in one weekend. Don’t be left out!

Ingredients: plums, cane sugar, pure citrus pectin
5 oz.

I blend turkey and black mission figs from old trees in Napa, California with a fine French cognac, Meyer lemon, raspberry, cinnamon, ginger and a fragrant rare blossom from China to create this fine jam. Enjoy on toast, with cheese.

Ingredients: figs, cane sugar, raspberries, cognac, lemons, vinegar, citrus pectin, spices.
5 oz.

As a child back in Wisconsin I’d bring rhubarb home on my bike from Uncle Charlie’s, and rhubarb sauce was the first thing I ever made. The patch at the farm has grown huge, a variety with thin deep red stalks. I blend this with superb organic strawberries from Ledesma Family Farms, tiny delicate berries whose scent can fill a room. Cooked with less sugar than fruit and a lemon-scented geranium for a bright citrus note.

Ingredients: strawberries, rhubarb, cane sugar, pure citrus pectin
8 oz.

A grower sells me the overripe raspberries he must pick out before shipping, only the darkest, most flavorful fruit. I spend hours pressing them through a fine mesh screen by hand, leaving only the seeds behind. I combine the juice and pulp with less sugar and infuse this with my favorite champagne-scented geranium, rose geranium and a bit of fresh lime juice.

The result is more a velvety seedless jam than a jelly. Cooking this takes me back to picking wild raspberries at the farm with my Grandmother and helping to make the jam we would eat all winter. Vibrant, bright, perfumed, this is one of the finest products I have ever produced

Ingredients: raspberries, cane sugar, pure citrus pectin, lime juice.
8 oz.