You Jelly?

This is a mesquite tree.

Mesquite trees have thorns. Be careful.

Mesquite trees also make beans.

Lots of them.

Beans can be made into jelly.

Beans?? Yup. Beans.

When they're "ripe" you can hear the seeds rattling around inside them, but a couple green ones isn't going to hurt anything.

Bean Jelly. Not Green Jelly, the hilarious 80s band that did a cover of "Three Little Pigs" metal style.

And the best part is that the beans grow wild across the street from Recipe Guy's house.

Mesquite Bean Jelly

• About a gallon of mesquite beans
• Water
• 2 c sugar
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 package of dry fruit pectin

I hate using the "package" measure, but I'm not sure how much that was... the package says 49 grams, so I guess around 25? It looked like maybe 1/6 of a cup... I think.

Kinda.

Um, I forgot to do an Ingredients pic with this one, so I'm just going to keep typing like I know what I'm doing.

The best way to rinse the beans is in a sink full of water.

This also encourages any critters who have been munching on your beans to vacate them. Yes, there will be critters. This is wild food which means it's someone else's link in the food chain, and you're going to have to out compete them if you want to eat.

Pick through the beans and remove any that have holes in them or look like they've been nibbled on. We had about a 50% recovery: we picked about 2 gallons of beans to get 1 gallon of usable ones.

Break the beans into pieces, cover them with an inch or two of cold water (above the bean level), and bring them to a boil.

After about 5 minutes, it starts to smell kinda sweet, almost like chamomile tea. Once it's boiled for 5 minutes, turn the heat off, cover it, and let it steep for another 30.

Definitely tea.

There's a distinct floral aroma, that you wouldn't expect from beans.

Strain the beans. You can pause here in the process and refridgerate or freeze your bean tea if you've done enough for the day.

When you're ready to make jelly, dump the tea back in the pot and bring it back to a boil. Keep boiling until you have 1 1/2 cups of tea. The colour definitely darkens as you concentrate it. This isn't the best light, but it's a lovely reddish gold colour.

(you can check your level by either pouring hot tea into a pyrex cup to check and then back into the pot to continue, or: before you start, put 1.5 cups of water in your pot to get an idea of what that level looks like then dump it out and put the tea in to boil)

I think this is the point at which we made a mistake.

Not a cataclysmic one by any means, but the end product wasn't quite what we were expecting.

We didn't let our tea cool.

This messed with our pectin, which needs to start out cool and then be heated, not poured into a pot of boiling tea.

Oops.

So, let your tea cool. Completely. Like until it's not hot.

Neither of us have ever made jam or jelly before and had no clue ... Taneasha is laffing at us, I know.

Okay, so with your cool concentrated tea...

Put the tea back in the pot and add the lemon juice, sugar, and the pectin.

Stir this gently as you bring it back to a boil. The recipe we found at Edible Austin said to boil it one minute, but looking at the pectin package... I'm seeing slightly different instructions. So, in addition not to starting with boiling tea, read the directions. (freaking engineers, think they know how to do things without instructions... )

Keep it at a full rolling boil (this means that the boil doesn't stop or slow if you stir it) for one minute.

Pour your supposedly thickened jelly into a large clean jar.

You can actually see the tiny beads of solidified pectin stuck to the sides of the pot in this pic. That's where some of the missing "jelly" went, I think. Wouldn't have happened if we'd started with cold tea.

We aren't properly "canning" the jelly because we only made a tiny test batch, and we're pretty sure it's going to be eaten quickly.

Because although it has the consistency of syrup,

it tastes fucking awesome.

The floral aroma totally stayed, and there's a distinct flavour of wildflower honey. Amazing on biscuits and with late season peaches.

This was my first attempt at using pectin to gel anything. What have you canned?

You Put the Lime on the Coconut

Just what the doctor ordered. 

A coworker asked me to make one of his favourite cookies for him, and gave me a recipe. Which I almost managed to follow.

Not Quite Jubilee Jumbles

What you need:

• 1/2 c butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs (I only had one and it worked, but 2 would be better)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp allspice (use more, at least 1/2 tsp)
• 2/3 c cream (I've also seen evaporated milk or sour cream used in these)
• 2 c coconut

What you gotta do:

As usual have everything at room temp and preheat your oven to 350.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the egg(s) and vanilla.

Stir in the cream. Gently at first then, once it's mostly incorporated, beat it for a minute or two until it's kinda fluffy.

In another bowl, combine the flour, soda, salt, and spice. I opted for allspice since I was going for slightly carribean flavours here. I was a little concerned the allspice would overpower things so I went easy on it. Too easy. It was pretty much not there. Needs more.

Mix the dry into the wet until it's just combined and then mix in the coconut.

If it feels too soft to you, chill the dough for an hour or so.

Drop spoonfuls onto parchment paper and bake at 350 for about 13 minutes. They don't spread much so you can get 15 onto one sheet.

Once they've cooled you can glaze them. This is not at all the typical glaze for a Jubilee Jumble. Like I said, these are Not Quite Jubilee Jumbles.

Limey Glaze for Coconutty Cookies

• zest of about half a lime
• 1/4 c cream (or so)
• a bunch of icing sugar

Yes, I started zesting the lime before I remembered that I needed an ingredients pic.

Zest the lime and stir the zest into the cream.

Add icing sugar until you get the right consistency.

This was too thin. It might have worked, but I think it would have taken longer to set than I was willing to wait.

This seemed better. I had to use a spoon to spread the glaze on the cookies rather than pour it on or dip them in.

Once they were all set, I packed them up, and took them to work for the spoiled children project managers. This is their last week of cookies for a while... School starts in a couple weeks and I'm heading to TX to hang out with Recipe Guy until I have to to calculus again.

You will not believe what we're going to make...