Happy new year 2017! The new year has started with beautiful, cold weather and lots of plans for the next year! However there is not that much we can actually do in the garden, so I thought I'd use the throwback Thursday excuse to post something from last harvest season! I never shared all the ways we conserved lingonberries. It was a really good lingonberry year and my Mom picked us litres after litres of them to conserve! Lingonberries are really cool to conserve as they have loads of natural benzoic acid in them so they need only a little help to make them last through the winter.
What I made with the lingonberries
I...
- conserved them in water in the root cellar
- mashed them and keep them in jars in the root cellar
- froze some of them
- dried a lot of berries
- made lingonberry juice
- and made pie!
It's really amazing how you can just put lingonberries in a glass jar, fill it with water and store the jar cool - and the lingonberries don't go bad for months and months! It's the same with the mashed berries. As long as they are covered in their own juice and stored cool, there's no mold development even without boiling, vinegar, sugar or salt. I did freeze some anyway just to see what it does to them, plus dried quite a lot of berries for muesli. These berries dry really funnily, as the skin stays round and tight and only when you touch the berry do you notice it is completely dry inside! At least I noticed that in many of the berries, plus they took a long time to dry.
One interesting lingonberry recipe I want to share with you is the lingonberry drink one. The link to the recipe I used is posted in Finnish at the site kotiliesi.fi, but I will translate it here loosely for you. The pie recipe I will leave for another throwback Thursday!
You'll need
| 1,5 kg | lingonberries |
| 2 litres | water |
| 0,5 ts | lemon- or wine acid |
| 900 g | sugar |
You simply blend the berries, boil and cool the water and pour it on the berries and mix in the lemon- or wine acid. You then let the mixture sit in a cool place for two days, stirring occationally. At the end you sieve the juice and mix in the sugar. The juice will hold surprisingly long in bottles - or it would but as it really delicious we drank it really quickly. Even though I used less sugar! The good thing is I have so much lingonberries mashed and in water so I can make more juice whenever I like. Brilliant!
Finished & botteled lingonberry juice
