In a jam, almost.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade right? Well since moving into our house nearly years ago, a set of overgrown grape vines has been the bane of our backyard.  They cover the entire side of our garage and encroach on our postage stamp sized city backyard, sending shoots out every which way.  

This year I decided to take action using some skills I picked up at the vineyard I worked at a few years ago in New Zealand. I hacked away at the vine, cutting it down to its canes in spring and kept pruning it back every time it strayed into backyard territory. As my old boss, the vitaculturalist would say, when  you take the excess shoots away, you force the vine to put more effort into the fruit rather than the leaves. He was right. 

This year for the first time we got a bumper crop of juicy, sweet grapes. I'm guessing they are of the Concord variety, so not exactly winemaking material. With a million little seeds they were too fiddly for the kids to eat, so there was only one thing I could do. Make jam.

I didn't want to buy any special canning equipment for such a small amount of grapes, so I searched for a super-simple recipe that wouldn't require me to skin or seed the grape or invest in new equipment or a box of pectin.

I found what I was looking for at Good Food Life, a recipe that only had three ingredients: grapes, sugar and an apple. Even I could handle that. Other recipes called for two to three times as much sugar, but I already knew the grapes were sweet, and I wanted to feel good about my kids eating this. 

After some help sorting the grape harvest from my son, 

I destemmed them and boiled them down with the cut up apple. 

Next, I pressed the juice and solids through a fine mesh strainer to get rid of the seeds while getting as much of the pulp as possible. After all, it's contact with the seeds and skins that gives red wine so many healthy antioxidants, so I wanted as much of that crimson pulp and juice as possible. My goal was to have something more jam than jelly-like in the end. After adding the sugar and simmering the mixture for another half hour, viola! 

We had jam, or at least something jam-like that will keep in the refrigerator for several weeks. It's a little thinner than store-bought, probably due to the lower sugar content. But on a slice of homemade bread or tucked into a PB&J, it's divine. It even showed up as a dip for whole-grain French toast sticks over the weekend. Not bad for a rookie effort. I am already planning my attack on the vines next spring in hopes of a bigger batch. We've already gone through one of the three jars of grape "jam" we got from our first batch. I don't think canning will be necessary at the rate we're eating it!