r2girls design » our house

passion fruit in a jar?

Sonia Powell — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:08:11 +0000

last night we canned our first passionfruit!!! first we cut the fruits in half. then we scooped out the saucey insides into a bowl.

we are saving the shells. evidently, there’s pectin in the rinds and if you soak the shells over night in water, you can peel the skin off easily and use the rinds to make jam. yum! we’re going to try that tomorrow.

we then boiled some water and added a bit of sugar to make a simple syrup. after we thought we had the right amount of sugar, we added the fruit pulp. we are very unscientific about the whole process, if you couldn’t tell. dan read up about it on the internet. from there, we just kind of play it by ear. so, we let our pulpy simple syurp mixture boil for a bit while we prepared the jars.

so, to prepare the jars, i washed them real good with hot soapy water. then we stuck them in a bath of boiling water to get them the same temperature as the boiling mixture we were about to pour into them. otherwise, the jars might crack. we pour the multen juicy liquid gold goodness into the boiling hot jars, wipe off the tops of the jar to get a good seal and then screw on the lids! but we’re not done yet. we still need to boil the full, sealed jars to create a lovely sucction seal so that our sauce will keep and not spoil. so, back into the boiling water they go. after about five to ten minutes, we take them out, set them on a towel so they don’t break and let them cool for 12 to 24 hours untouched. after about ten minutes of cooling, the center part of the lids started popping down! telling us that the seal had been formed. such a satisfying noise.

we used about twenty fruits and got four small jars of passionfruit sauce. yum! they aren’t going to last very long, i can tell you that. over some vanilla ice cream or chessecake! um… my mouth in watering.

our search for jars

Sonia Powell — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:17:26 +0000

the passion fruit are starting to drop off the vine by the dozens. it’s literally sprinkling passionfruits over here! it’s great but we need to start canning them before they go bad. we started our long and arduous task of looking for mason jars. and we finally found them! who’d thunk that it would be so difficult to find canning jars. we looked at food 4 less, target, smart n final, osh, and a few other places that i just can’t think of right now. we were out running errands one day and thought we could just pop into a store and find their vast selection of mason jars at our finger tips, ready to be scooped up. after going into three, we gave up, went home and started calling around. and guess where we finally found them… gelson’s. weird, right.

so, we have the jars now. all we have to do is make the sauce! i’ll let you know what our process is for that when we do it.

passiflora edulis

Sonia Powell — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:15:04 +0000

it’s the beginning of passionfruit season! this is the first year that we’ve gotten any fruit. with the last weeks’ heat, tons of them have ripened and are now falling off the vine. soon we’re going to have to break out our canning gear!

the heat is on

Sonia Powell — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:39:00 +0000

it’s starting to get hot around here. for some (the cats), salvation comes by being under or half under something.

here goes something…

Sonia Powell — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:12:26 +0000

hi! so, i’ve decided to start a blog! i’m want to share with whoever wants to know what i’m doing and what other people are doing that i like.

so, i guess i’ll just jump right in!

this last saturday, july 11th, some friends of mine and i went to the renegade craft fair in downtown los angeles. it was tons of fun and full of everything i love, crafts! i got a bunch of ideas and can’t wait to start making stuff.

there were a few “stations” set up where one could learn a new craft. you could make a stuff animal, learn how to needle-felt and my favorite, linoleum block printing, taught by the women over at the reform school on sunset.