spring foraging + preserving

brooke and i have a goal of making at least one preserve a week, all summer long. this may prove to be difficult because we're trying to do without buying what needs to be preserved and we aren't sure what we have access to that we can preserve this week. have you found any patches of wild asparagus lately that we could get our hands on? or rhubarb? 

last week we tried violet jelly and lilac jelly, both firsts for the two of us...and neither of them set. wah wah. granted, i made a mistake with the violet jelly (too much liquid...not paying attention. bah!) but what happened to the lilac one is a mystery. now we have two delicious floral syrups which fortunately taste delicious with lemon juice, vodka and ice - mmm. 

ah well, we're beginners. if i can nose out some more lilacs with esker later on today, we'll try again and this time be more careful with boiling times. 

for the lilac "jelly" we used this recipe. i looked at a lot of different recipes and they were all very similar. i chose this one because we only had one package of certo and the other ones were for bigger batches. the lilac syrup really has that strong floral perfume-like quality of the flower.

for the violet recipe i used this one. the violet flavour isn't very strong though the colour is beautiful!

brooke made some labels for the lilac "drink mix" using the 'water-slide decal' technique in christine schmidt's (of yellow owl workshop) AWESOME book Print Workshop. we're going to have to get some jars unadorned by raised designs because the sticker obviously doesn't mold very well over all the bumps and ridges, but no matter. i cannot wait to do more of the projects in this book, they look incroyable. yup.