Feijoas

Hi guys. It's been a while and I kind of miss it. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with this blog and I felt sad thinking about it rotting away in digispace. But, I decided I'd keep blogging and I'll get back to posting something new every week. I don't know what about and most of it's going to be pretty boring now that I'm back in New Zealand and this is a forewarning. So, this is the first of my "come back".

FEIJOAS!

(It's all downhill from here.)

Okay, to all my students who don't know what feijoas are, feijoas are a small green fruit like a guava, but tarter. In New Zealand, feijoa season is around Easter time from March-May. I love feijoas. To eat them you can either bite off the end and suck out the fruit, or scoop it out with a spoon.

One of my new things is preserving. Along our driveway we have a lot of feijoa trees and my grandma bottles them. My grandma is a feijoa bottling pro. Here's how she's been making them for the past 50 years.

Step 1. Pick them.

Step 2. Clean and sterilize your lids and jars so they are ready when you need them.

Step 3. Prepare your sugar brine in a big pot. I like a 1 to 2 ratio of sugar to water. Bring it to the boil then turn the stove off.

Step 4. Spend a couple of hours scooping and peeling the feijoas.

You need at least 2-3 times this amount to make the ten medium sized bottles that I did.

Step 5. Add the feijoas to the brine and let them simmer for a bit until it starts to boil. While you're doing this, put your jars in the oven to heat them up and stick the lids in a bowl of hot water.

Scoop out the froth if there is a lot.

Step 6. Ladle the hot feijoas into the hot jars. Everything must be hot. The jars must be hot so that they can seal. Wipe the top of the bottle so there is no debris on it and quickly screw the lid on. Put it on the bench and wait for the "pop".

I bought the self-sealing jars and after fifteen or twenty minutes or so they all started popping because the heat of all the hot stuff sucks the lid down. When the lid gets sucked down you hear a popping sound and this lets you know that the bottle is properly sealed. If it doesn't pop then you'll need to do it again if you want it keep it in the cupboard for a few months.

It takes a long time to bottle feijoas and if you ever get one from a friend, GIVE THE BOTTLE BACK! Nan said that once upon a time she had over six dozen large bottles. Now she's got barely a quarter of that because bad whanau don't give the bottles back.

And there you have it: how to make bottled feijoas. Serve with cream, ice-cream, yoghurt, cereal or eat straight from the bottle. Yummeh.