Prepped Living Blog

We have written about lilac jelly but never made a post about it. It is time to remedy that! The first time we made lilac jelly, we had beautiful medium and dark purple blossoms. The jelly turned out to be....surprise...a lovely lilac color! Well, at least it was purple until we canned it. Something about the canning process turned it from a lilac to a golden color. The taste was amazing, but I was a bit sad that the purple faded. We have a white lilac bush at our current house. The blossoms are beautiful, the scent is lovely, and they make a wonderful jelly with a pale golden color. To make our jelly, we first picked lilacs and pulled off just the blossoms. Once we had 4 cups of blossoms, we soaked them in water with a bit of baking soda to remove any bugs and dirt. After about 30 minutes of soaking, we put fresh water on to boil, then rinsed the blossoms well with cool water. We transferred the blossoms to a half gallon jar, poured 5 cups of hot water over the top, and stirred with a...

Floral jellies and syrups are a lovely addition to your pantry. If you are unable to grow fruits and berries for jams, syrups, or jellies, floral options can make it easy to "harvest what you have" since many people can at least grow flowers.  Roses are a common and much-loved flower to grow. They are particularly good to have in your flower garden, since both the petals and hips have many uses. We have foraged rose petals for several years now, but this is the first year we have actually made jelly from the petals. I have been so excited to try this recipe! Making the Syrup We used a rose petal jelly recipe we found online.  We  checked the online directions and quantities against the insert for the pectin to be sure that they instructions aligned. They did - in short, both said to boil one minute on the stove, add sugar, boil one minute, then can. I was a bit leery, because we have tried the "updated" instructions with the lesser boil time after adding sugar (the ...

The garlic scape salt was such a hit, that we decided to try another herbal salt. While the garlic scapes are not yet ready,  we currently have chives growing in our garden. After looking online for recipes, we found two - one for chive salt and one for chive blossom salt. We did not have enough blossoms for the chive blossom recipe, so we decided to make the chive salt and toss in some of the blossoms for an extra bit of color. First, we wilted the chives for about 2 hours to lessen the amount of moisture in them. Then, we blended approximately 3/8 cup of chopped chives with 1 1/4 cups of salt. This was more than the recipe called for, but we wanted a strong flavor. After blending, we spread the mixture out on parchment paper on a baking sheet. We pulled the petals from the blossoms and sprinkled them over the salt. We put the mixture in the oven at its lowest setting (170 degrees) for 1 3/4 - 2 hours. We opened the oven every 30 minutes and stirred the salt mixture to allow even ...