Simple Joys: Preserving Spring

Recently one of the mom's from my old local attachment and natural parenting groups sent us all a link about making violet jelly.  Later that day W and I took a walk and realized that our new neighborhood was teeming with violets so we decided to give it a try.  Our family went for a walk and picked as many violets around the neighborhood as we could.  Two cups is quite a lot of violets to pick!  But it was a wonderful family outing and we found some really lovely wooded areas in our neighborhood.

We brought them home and I then washed them and let the steep over night.

After they were strained the water was a lovely deep blue color and the violets were practically white.

The magic happened when we added the lemon juice.  The violet infusion turned from deep blue to this beautiful bright shade of pink-violet.

I also recently used this same recipe to make rose petal jelly.  For that we used some of the roses from our balcony and petals from some of the rose bushes my husband cared for last summer ( we visited his old workplace and I gathered them from some of the roses that were starting to fade a bit).

Of course W and I also made jam from all those strawberries we picked.

Here's a sampling of our spring preserves.

Of the three I think the rose petal jelly is my favorite.  It is delicate and just heavenly.  It doesn't have the pink color I was expecting, but I did not want to add food coloring to it.  My mom and I have however toyed with the idea of adding a couple of drops of beet juice  to make it more pink but hopefully not enough to make it taste like beets.  She's going to test it out so we can see how it works.

 I was greatly surprised  by how much I enjoyed the violet jelly.  I remember really disliking some violet candy I was given as a child.  I found the taste to be sickening and can honestly still remember it very clearly.  I'm not sure why I even actually decided to make violet jelly based on that experience.  This jelly was however, much more mild and not sickening at all.  The taste was pleasant, floral and not overpowering at all.  We served the violet jelly with our Easter dinner and it was a big hit.


I'm going to use this post to participate in Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday.  So fun to see what so many people are creating!