French Breakfast

Had the family visiting for the weekend. Lots of cooking and drinking, not much time for blogging. They've all gone home now.

And now I'm on my own again, with only the cats for company, there's no excuse for failing to share my meals with the bloggyverse again. I give you breakfast!

Actually, I'm not so far subsumed into French culture as to breakfast on a cup of strong coffee and a Gitanes merely. I also had bread and jam.



And I made the jam myself. From apricots.

This is not the entrée to a scholarly exposition on bottling; full of arcane tips from the WI on extracting the pectin, dire warnings of botulism from inadequately prepared jam jars or comfortable intimations of middle class smugness. I chopped up the fruit, removed the stones, applied the commercial jam sugar and stuck the stuff in bottles. You can read up about that sort of stuff anywhere, even on the back of the sugar packet which saves buying books.

But I would recommend you try it, because fresh apricot jam is a step or two closer to heaven even than bought apricot jam and that's pretty damn good.