crab apple jelly party

i made my own friggin' jelly!
such a feeling of power overcame me this morning. breakfast. 6:30. man and dogs asleep. woman with first spoonful of homemade jelly at the breakfast table. i can make my own brotaufstrich.
second best thing to this whole jammin' [jelly... not an attractive english word.] affair: the crab apples were free. grow around here. turns out you can eat them. make gelee. never made it before. but what the heck. there was a day in my life when i had never eaten solid food before and i conquered that, too. so yesterday, i set out the collect fallen crab apples, wood apples in german, and pick some more from low branches.

 

bounty.

carried home in my shopping basket, seven pounds of apples. 'at's right, i'm bad. watched a cooking show while i sorted them into three piles and cut out what worm might have slipped past my eagle eyes when i picked them.

let's not forget, i'm vegetarian.

first i made the juice. from water. nearly free, out of the faucet. the color, people! [imagine good quality photo here]

showcased on a 100 percent cotton ikea kitchen towel.

then i took out the dogs to help me pick a bit of russian sage. because it looks like lavender. because it grows around here, too, and is, hence, free. [setting aside that 'nothing is free in a free world' and the HOA pays for watering the flower and paid for the plant in the first place but, whatevah, peeps, i am homesteading here!]

showcased on the ikea solid wood table.

[newsflash: god does not hate sweden.]

then i added almost a kilogram of sugar, brown and white mixed [because i didn't have enough white anymore and i'm all about improv if it means i don't have to go to the store] to the juice and simmered. until the gelee passed the gelierprobe. poured it into reused glasses, previously sterilized in boiling water. dipped the sage into said water. pushed the sage into the gelee, watched it bob up, screwed the lid on. et voilà.

reused glass, free fruit, 50 cents of sugar. 

come to moooom-eeeee!