Jelly, dumplings, meatloaves, turnovers.

The apple and blackberry mush I cooked up last night produced four cups of juice which showed a good clot in the pectin test (a teaspoon or so of juice in a glass of meths).


So I added 1.1 kg of sugar and boiled it all until the setting point was reached …

… then bottled it and labeled it. One jar will go to the donor of the apples, the rest will add to my huge stash in the pantry.


Next thing is to start preparing for my weekend away - tomorrow night I'm playing bridge so I can't do a great deal then. Here we have the beginnings of, from left to right; shrimp and pork dumplings (pork mince, chopped shrimp, mirin, soy sauce, onions - much what Maki puts in her shuumai dumplings but in different proportions); stuffing for a couple of chickens I'll put in the oven to cook while I'm at bridge tomorrow night (breadcrumbs, onion, salt, fresh parsley and sage); and meatloaf (pork mince, beef mince, tomato sauce, salt and pepper, onions, breadcrumbs, eggs, milk):


And here it is after I've had my hands in it squishing it all around:


The stuffing went into the cupboard, waiting for me to add a bit of melted butter before inserting it into the chickens' orifices tomorrow. Most of the dumpling mix was turned into two different shapes of dumpling using the same wrappers, which are Korean and came in a packet which is unreadable by me.


I steam-fried them as per Maki's instructions.


There was still some dumpling mix left, so I made two small pork and shrimp meatloaves, which I cooked at the same time as the one large (for my trip) and two small (for bentos) meatloaves made from the proper meatloaf mixture.


Then I used the rest of the apples from Sue's tree to make some apple turnovers. I really could not be bothered making flaky pastry, so I whipped up a batch of sweet short pastry and used that. It's not the same, but it'll do. See the lovely yellow New Zealand butter? Comes from cows that eat grass and live in paddocks. There was a time when the EU (or EEC as it was then) tried to stop the importing of our butter, because they thought it had dye in it. It took our diplomats a good few months to persuade them that it was natural.


The finished turnovers - they'll probably get eaten by starving non-cooking motorcycle racers. They'd probably better, because they're about 600 Cal each.