Month eight Tigress’s can jam canning challenge and for August the ingredient chosen by the inspired and inspiring Julia is tomatoes. My relationship with this ubiquitous fruit has been a checkered one. I hated tomatoes as a kid but learnt to tolerate them later on. I do like them as a sauce for pizza, applied with a lightness of touch though. I can now eat cherry tomatoes raw and, like biting into any fruit, appreciate their sweetness so I suppose you could say I’ve made progress.
But it is as objects of beauty that tomatoes especially come into their own. The resurgence of interest in growing heritage varieties has brought all these wonderfully coloured tomatoes to the fore; striped, heart and pear shaped, shaded like a shop display of lipsticks, from gold to chocolate. They are all so fantastically photogenic and worth growing for looks alone.
As an ingredient for canning, they are on the acidity cusp. Tomatoes require special attention for bottling safely using the water processing method or else should be pressure canned. They are only just on the acid side of neutral and acidity can vary for different varieties, so it is necessary to add a little more acidity in the form of lemon juice or citric acid to make sure they stay safely putt. It is important that time spent preserving has a very definite pay off later so it makes sense for me to bottle really useful tomato passata-type sauces for cooking up further down the line into pizza toppings, pasta sauces or as additions to winter casseroles.

Each year I begin the growing season with high hopes for an extensive range of weird and wonderful tomato varieties. I don’t have a greenhouse so can only grow toms out in the open. We’ve had two consecutive years of blight bringing these plans to a soggy and disappointingly diseased halt, but this year the weather has been kinder. Tinned tomatoes are as cheap as chips, so I don’t think it is really cost effective to bottle tomatoes unless you have your own homegrown supply or you are able to mop up someone elses glut. The plants I have growing in the garden are still some way from the ‘glut’ stage. Thankfully my neighbour Jane has a greenhouse as well as green fingers. She sells her excess garden produce from her garden wall. Last week I picked up four generous punnets of yellow and red tomatoes from the wall and dropped my payment into the honesty box provided.

So first a basic tomato sauce. These cherry tomato varieties are as sweet as anything though perhaps not the most ideal kinds for bottling. For sauces, larger fleshy varieties like Roma and San Marzano are good. Skinning so many tiny fruits was definitely out of the question for starters. Tomatoes can be very watery, which means that they will require considerable cooking to reduce, thicken and intensify the flavour, unless some of the liquid is removed first.
In order to give a fresher flavoured result with less cooking time I began by slitting each fruit and removing the seeds by running my thumb quickly through their middles, collecting the seeds in a sieve placed over a bowl. Any collected juice would come in handy later. After a brief cooking time of 10 minutes the de-seeded tomatoes were then processed using a passata mill, running it through several times to separate the skins from the pulp. The passata mill is a bit of kit I acquired some years ago when dreaming of a bounteous tomato crop that never materialised. The mill has sat unused in its box ever since so this was its first opportunity to prove its worth. I must say that I wasn’t too impressed. Passata-ing the tomatoes was a messy and annoying business (compounded by trying to take photographs at the same time). Tomato juice splattered all over the place and possibly it was my fault, but juice was squirting out the handle side as well! Next time I will most likely use my regular food mill over a bowl, which though still requiring patience would be less messy and more controllable. Depending on the scale of the project, to remove skins and any stray seeds you could simply push the tomatoes through a sieve if you prefer. Still too watery for my liking, I strained the flesh again briefly in a sieve collecting more juice to add to what had been collected earlier. 2.5Kg (5 1/2lbs) of tomatoes resulted in 775g (1 3/4lbs) puree and 750ml (1.3 pts) of juice.

HOW TO BOTTLE TOMATO PUREE

Prepare the water bath, jars and seals ready for bottling (canning). For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here.
Put the pureed tomatoes in a pan and simmer for a short time to reach a consistency that suits you so excess juice has evaporated. If the puree is already thick enough simply bring to boiling point. I added 1 tsp sea salt (a non essential, so add salt to own taste or leave out all together) plus an aditional acidic booster. As a general guide you need to add one of the following to every 500ml (1 pt) tomato puree: 1Tbsp lemon juice or 1/4 tsp citric acid. I used balsamic vinegar instead, adding 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar per 500ml (1pt) puree.
Place a basil leaf inside each jar against the glass and fill jars with tomato, leaving headspace required for your type of jar. Remove bubbles from sides of jars using a small spatula, wipe rims clean and seal. Process 500ml (1 pt) jars for 35 mins and 1ltr (quart) jars for 45 mins. Remove jars from water bath and leave till cold before testing the seals. Any jars with loose seals will require reprocessing or you can keep them in the fridge for using up within a few days. Remember to label all your jars before storing them.
My tomatoes made 2 x 350g (12oz) jars of sauce plus a bit more that I had with pasta for my dinner that evening.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE JUICE

It seemed a shame to waste the lovely sweet juice collected whilst extracting the tomato puree, so I decided to turn it into tomato jelly. You could flavour tomato jelly with fresh ginger and ground coriander or finely chopped chilli. After much deliberation I eventually chose vanilla and white pepper for a jelly with a sweet / savoury crossover. This jelly is delicious on sourdough toast with cream cheese and I used it to fill tiny savoury pastry cases, topped with sour cream or crumbled goats cheese for a really exquisite little mouthful.
As tomato juice is lacking in pectin, a boost in the form of the addition of lemon or apple juice is helpful. Having bottled some whitecurrant juice several weeks earlier to use at times like this, I added some of that for its setting quality. Preserving sugar containing added pectin could also be employed here. Adjust proportions to suit what you have available.

TOMATO, VANILLA AND WHITE PEPPER JELLY

750ml (1.3 pts) tomato juice (a byproduct of making the puree above)
550g (1 1/4lb) sugar
Juice of 1 lemon or 150ml (2/3 cup) whitecurrant juice
1 vanilla pod, split and seeds scraped from inside
1/2 tsp ground white pepper

Prepare the water bath, jars and seals ready for canning. For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here.

Pour the juice through a jelly bag, collecting the juice in a measuring jug. To every 600ml (1 pt) juice add 450g (1 lb sugar). Place all the ingredients in a preserving pan. Stir constantly over low heat until the sugar has dissolved then turn the heat up to bring to a rolling boil. Boil to setting point, (it took me about 10 minutes) when a blob of syrup on a cold plate will formed a skin when you push your finger over the top of it. If using a jam thermometer it will register 220F 105C. Remove the vanilla pod and fill hot jars, leaving the required headroom for their type. De-bubble the sides using a small spatula or chopstick, wipe jar rims clean, before sealing and placing in the hot water bath. Process for 10 minutes, remove from the bath, then leave till cold before testing the seals. Label and store.

The ratio of sugar to juice is the classic one used when making jellies. This jelly is very nice indeed but I will be tempted to cut down on the amount of sugar when I make this next. It is often safe to keep jams and jellies without hot water processing (canning) them. If you do can them you are making doubly certain that they will be preserved safely for a year or even longer.

Month seven Tigress’s can jam canning challenge and for July the choice of ingredients was mine, and I choose cucurbits. I began by making a jam to use up some Galia melons I’d bought to photograph, along with some frozen plums that needed using from the freezer before this years harvest requires the space. Anyhow, that’s another story, jam wasn’t what I wanted from the July canjam. The best thing about taking part in this global canning event is the stretch, the discovering anew. I was wanting to do some pickling.

I am a pickle novice, having never been drawn to them, through lack of positive experiences. Pickles for me have been onions served with cheese, English ploughmans-lunch style, Branston pickle, a manufactured brown sweet gloopy relish that has its moments in a cheese butty (sandwich), and pickled beetroot, that was once the only way you ever found this root veg and that comes with a powerful acetic hit. I do have one recollection of my friend Mary eating pickled umeboshi plums to ward off sea sickness when island hopping in Greece, they seemed pretty disgusting but did work. Later in life the pickled ginger with sushi element crept into my middle class lifestyle. That’s it, the full extent of my pickling life …. so far.

I’ve read loads of recipes and am intrigued by what is called in the US ‘Bread and Butter’ pickle. It obviously doesn’t mean these are included as ingredients but does it mean that it is meant to be eaten on bread and butter? I assumed this to be so until a google search ‘what does bread and butter pickle mean?’ pointed out another alternative. Something that is your ‘bread and butter’ is your main form of income, so bread and butter pickle could be the breadwinner of the pantry, your stalwart pickle, a good all rounder that you can’t do without. Anymore ideas, please let me know. I ended up making up a recipe based on the many I’d read. I think my summer squash pickle is more or less a bread and butter pickle, made with summer squash instead of cucumbers.
Luckily, this week in the Taurus market garden, the first summer squashes are ready to harvest. Some Early Prolific straightneck squashes provided the perfect starting point for my foray into pickling. This yellow squash is lovely eaten raw and has an excellent flavour. I decided to go for colour, adding plump purple scallions and orange sweet peppers into the mix. As often happens, the colours change during preparation, in particular the purple onions lost their hue, but I still ended up with a beautifully coloured pickle with a summery vibe.
If you, like me, have never really tried pickles, MAKE THIS ONE!!!! It is just fantastic. I only made it 2 days ago and even without the usual month mellowing off period, it tastes amazing. I haven’t a clue what you serve it with, but straight from the jar with a fork is working for me. This was just what I needed to turn me into a pickle fiend.

SUMMER SQUASH PICKLE

Makes 6 x 500ml (1pint) jars

1.5Kg ( 3 1/4lbs) summer squash courgettes or small zucchini
400g (14 oz) onions
300g (11oz) sweet peppers, 2-3 peppers
200g (7 oz) salt
1 ltr (1 3/4 pint) white wine vinegar
250ml (1/2 pt) water
450g (1lb) sugar
1 1/2 tsp celery seed
2 Tbsp mustard seed
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp turmeric
6 small dried red chillies
1 tsp black peppercorns

Top and tail the squash and cut into uniform sized slices, so they are about .5cm (1/4 in) thick. Slice the onions and deseed and slice the peppers. Place all the vegetables in a glass bowl and sprinkle with the salt, turning them all over so the salt is evenly distributed. Cover the bowl and leave for 12-24 hours. Drain off the liquid that is drawn from the veg, rinsing and draining thoroughly several times to remove as much salt as possible, finally leaving to drain.
Prepare the water bath, jars and seals ready for canning. For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here. Place the vinegar, water, sugar and spices in a pan and bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Simmer for 5 minutes then add the vegetables. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Pack the vegetables into hot sterilised jars, filling them to leave required headroom, then top up with the vinegar, distributing the seeds evenly amongst the jars. Seal and process the jars for 10 minutes. Pickles always improve on keeping for at least a month before opening, if you can wait that long.
Pickles have a high acid content so can often be made without hot water processing (canning) them. If you can them you are making doubly certain that they will be preserved safely for a year or more.

Each month when the Tigress’s can jam canning challenge ingredient has been announced, I’ve been relieved that it wasn’t up to me to choose. Being the only Brit taking part, it seemed such a massive responsibility to come up with a seasonal ingredient that would somehow accommodate all canjammers, travel half way around the world and fit into everyones canning calendar. Then the other day Tigress emailed me to say it was my shot and for a moment I was filled with dread. I say a moment, and it really was just a moment, as if by divine suggestion, the word ‘cucurbits’ fell from the sky and landed right on my head. The Tigress’ Can Jam ingredient for July is cucurbits, but it’s cucurbits with a proviso (see below).

In case you aren’t familiar with the term cucurbits, it refers to Cucurbitaceae, a plant family commonly known as melons and gourds, including crops like cucumbers, squashes (including pumpkins), loofahs, melons and watermelons…. So what’s the proviso? First let’s dispense with the loofahs! (too chewy), secondly, pumpkins and winter squashes, they’re out. It is most likely too early for them anyways but also they are troublesome ingredients to deal with for hot water processing and I aint taking responsibility for that.
So that leaves cucumbers, a traditional pickling favourite and one I want to learn lots about from you experts over in the US. (By the way, as far as I’m concerned, bread and butter pickle should actually contain what it says on the jar. Likewise ‘coffee cake’ Anyhow, I digress…) Summer squashes such as courgettes and marrows… ha… gotcha! Of course this is yet another strange difference in the language we share. To all you canjammers in the US, small zucchini and zucchini. I have Sarah at Toronto Tasting Notes to thank for help translating here. And finally, to bring a luscious sweetness to the proceedings, melons of all types.

I’m hoping this group of ingredients is specific enough to make sense as well as being wide enough to cater for everyone. I am finding that Tigress’ Can Jam is giving me the opportunity to try new ingredients I’ve never worked with before, as well as making me approach familiar ingredients in new ways or ways I hadn’t got round to trying. I think these cucurbits offer scope for all manner of pickles, chutneys, relishes and jams and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with, as six months in, the canning done so far has been a total revelation. As previously mentioned, I want to learn how to can my cucumbers like I’m in that Little House on the Praire. Marrows, zucchini to most of you, I’ve always considered a waste of everybodies time, but I’m now ready to reconsider. There are endless recipes for marrow chutneys and jams and as this vegetable is effortless to grow, I really think it is time to learn to love this clod-hopping monster of a gourd.

Courgettes, or small zucchini, are one of those glut kitchen ingredients that there are never enough uses for to reduce the surplus mountain, so it will be fabulous if some of you could come up with some essential recipes that the rest of us can’t live without.
And then there are the melons…. they fill me with such romantic notions; from the pickled watermelon rinds I’ve read of and dreamed about tasting, the spicy syruppy concoctions that might be sweet and sour at the same time, and finally, French inspired preserves, combining melon with lemon, or ginger, or raspberries, or peaches, that transport you to a village in Provence. Are you getting the gist?

I hope you feel inspired to go off and make cucurbits your own. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. If you need to refer to Tigress’ canning guide you will find it here. All recipes must be posted between friday july 16 and friday july 23rd, with friday july 23rd at midnight being the cut off point. Tigress has allowed two extra days at the beginning this month so if you are so inclined and you can get your post up on the earlier days, please do! as it will help her to get a head start on the round-up. (Bravo Tigress for all your work).

Month six Tigress’s can jam canning challenge and for June the choice of ingredients is positively bountiful with anything ending in ‘..erries’. As if that wasn’t enough, after other can jammers queried what that meant, the category was widened even further to include anything ending in ‘..urrants’ as well. I am just hoping that we haven’t covered the whole soft fruit spectrum in one fell swoop. With summer officially about to begin, at last the preserving year is shifting up a gear and a dearth is just starting to resemble a glut. After last months project, my rhubarb ketchup, that was a success but in a brown kind of way, I’ve been yearning for something colourful and British, something that sings a song of summer, con brio, whilst at the same time celebrating the beginning of the soft fruit season. So gooseberries it is.
I have cooked with gooseberries before but not to any great extent. Gooseberries are another fruit that seem to grow easily and yet are underused and under appreciated, an old fashioned country berry with an unfashionable reputation. This is another one of those puzzling fruits that is everywhere but at the same time hard to find. You either have to grow your own or know someone else who does. I’ve recently planted a few bushes on my newly acquired allotment, and though there wont be any crops to harvest this year, hopefully they will bear fruit-a-plenty in the years ahead. Varieties come with down to earth names, like Leveller, Invicta and Pax, very much old-school allotment sounding. More recently food writers have started to feature gooseberries, so perhaps they are on the cusp of a renaissance.

For the canjam I have chosen to make a gooseberry and elderflower jelly. There is something so pure and delicious looking about jellies and in this instance the end colour, though a glorious pinkish amber is nothing like the fresh green that the fruit starts out as. I have read that if you cook gooseberries in a copper pan they retain their green colour, but as I have no direct experience of this, I am loath to pass on the information parrot fashion. In my stainless steel jam pan, green gooseberries tend to turn an unappealing khaki colour as they cook but once the extracted juice and sugar begin to work together, an altogether more magical hue develops. Elderflowers make a classic partnership with gooseberries and should be ready for picking at the same time, though the flowers are much more fleeting. Here, in the Forest of Dean, the flowers have been in bloom for about two weeks but the berries are only just starting to ripen. I’ve used fresh elderflowers but you could use elderflower cordial instead if the only flowers to hand are past their best.

GOOSEBERRY AND ELDERFLOWER JELLY

Makes approx 1.3kg (3lbs)

2Kg (4lbs 8oz) gooseberries, rinsed and drained
approx 20 freshly picked elderflower heads
1 lemon
sugar

There’s no need to top and tail the fruit. Place fruit in a pan with 1 litre (1 3/4 pints) of water. Add the elderflowers and heat the pan, bringing to a simmer, then cook gently until the berries are soft and start to burst. Pour into a jelly bag (that has been sterilised by boiling for 5 minutes beforehand) suspended over a bowl, add the juice of the lemon and leave to drip overnight to collect all the juice. Discard the pulp remaining in the bag and measure the juice. Pour into a preserving pan and add 450g (1lb) of sugar to every 600ml (1 pint) of juice.
Prepare the water bath, jars and seals ready for canning. For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here. Stir the syrup over a low heat until the sugar is completely dissolved then turn up the heat and boil rapidly to reach setting point. To test for a set, drip some syrup onto a cold plate and see if it quickly forms a skin that will wrinkle when you push your finger across the surface. Alternatively, use a jam thermometer and when it shows 105C (220F) you know setting point has been reached. (I usually employ both methods at the same time to be on the safe side!) Pour into the jars leaving required headroom for your type of jars, seal and hot water process for 10 minutes. Remove the jars from the water bath and leave them till completely cold before testing the seals are vacuum fixed. Label and store.
You can omit hot water processing if you wish as a jelly of this type should store well without, but processing makes it extra safe and will mean the jelly should keep for a year or longer.

Month three Tigress’s can jam canning challenge and the chosen ingredient covers a multitude of choices, as anything classed as an allium fits the bill. I intended to post about pickled wild garlic but with the deadline looming and this post ready to roll, I’m running with pickled onions instead. The wild garlic, almost completed, will follow after.
I’m really more of a jam and chutney person but the Tigresscanjam challenge is giving me reasons to explore things I want to know more about. Pickles aren’t something I’ve developed much of a taste for and I hadn’t thought that they figured much in my upbringing. Then I remembered an onion and vinegar condiment, served at my grandparents house when I was little, as an accompaniment to Lancashire hotpot. It was made very simply of chopped raw onions marinated in malt vinegar, simple as. Never a great meat eater, I recall especially looking forward to this onion relish, eaten with the delicious sliced potatoes that were part of the hotpot.
My cousin Jackie, an ex-Blackpool landlady who can rustle up a mean Lancashire hotpot, told me that this onion relish is the traditional companion to this regional speciality along with pickled red cabbage. Though I have no recollection of ever being served pickled cabbage as a kid, knowing this makes me pleased that pickling is part of my own heritage too, something I’d managed to forget about until the canjam challenge got me thinking. Then last week I found this onion-shaped Weck preserving jar in a charity shop, so filling it with pickled onions seemed perfectly appropriate.

Pickling has to be one of the easiest things ever. I’ve chosen to make a sweet pickling vinegar using traditional malt vinegar with added brown sugar, honey plus a few spices. Pickling vinegars are really delicious and give plenty of scope for experimentation. Any leftover vinegar can be turned into salad dressings or be drizzled on your chips. The shallots need to be salted at the beginning to draw out excess liquid, which will help the onions to retain their crunch. I have hot water processed my jar of pickles to meet the criteria of the challenge, give myself more practice at canning and to use the jar in the way it was intended, but pickled onions are a pretty safe bet without that palaver. The processing makes them extra safe.

SWEET PICKLED ONIONS

Fills a litre (quart) sized jar

750g (1 1/2lbs) shallots
50g (2oz) salt
.5ltr (1pint) malt vinegar
100g (4oz) soft brown sugar
100g (4oz) honey
1 tsp peppercorns
1 dried red chilli
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
5cm (2in) piece of cinnamon stick
2cm (1in) cube of fresh ginger sliced

Pour boiling water over the shallots, leave them for a few minutes, then drain and rinse with cold water. Remove the skins and place in a glass bowl, sprinkling the salt in layers over them. Leave overnight, then rinse and drain them before packing into the hot sterilised jar.
Place the vinegar and the remaining ingredients in a pan, stir over a medium heat to dissolve the sugar and honey, then bring to the boil. Pour over the onions to cover, pushing the chilli and cinnamon stick between the shallots on the outside of the jar, leaving 1 – 2cm (1/2 – 3/4in) headspace. Seal with the lid and process for 15 minutes in a hot water bath. For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here. You could use 2 500ml (1 pint) sized jars instead, in which case you only need to process them for 10 minutes. Once cooled store the pickled onions for 4-8 weeks before eating.

Month two, Tigress’s can jam canning challenge, and the ingredient to grapple with is ‘carrots’. They aren’t in season in the UK, not as a freshly pulled from the ground seasonal veg at any rate, otherwise I would have found some of those trendy purple ones to work with, or a nice bunch with their greenery attached that would have made a lovely picture tied in a bundle with garden twine. So a brown paper bagful of locally-grown and stored organic specimens is my starting point.

There is one good thing about it, I’ve learnt a lot since ‘carrots’ was announced. I wanted to find a recipe suitable for canning that needs carrots instead of just includes them, so I trawled through my extensive collection of books on preserving. I felt sure I would unearth a war time gem, thinking carrots would have been used more as a sweetener in times when sugar was scarce, but nothing turned up. I didn’t want to simply bottle carrots for the sake of it, couldn’t find a suitable pickle recipe, was about to adapt a Madhur Jaffrey recipe for quince and lemon chutney (by adding carrots) then forgot and cooked my last quinces. I was tempted by my trusted and much loved ‘Let’s Preserve It’ by Beryl Wood, a little jewel of a paperback from 1970 which contains 579! recipes, including a carrot chutney, a jam, 2 marmalades as well as a recipe for spiced carrots. but eventually settled on combining carrots with rhubarb in a jam.

British forced rhubarb is just starting to appear for sale. The season for forced rhubarb, grown in the ‘Yorkshire triangle’ begins January through to April, when field grown takes over. My head has been full of rhubarb all month as I am sorting out which varieties to plant on my allotment. Rhubarb alone is fantastic, so I just hoped that the inclusion of carrots in the recipe would be a wonderful addition rather than just meeting the canjam deadline. I’ve also added some chopped stem ginger and candied peel as I have some candied melon slices left over from baking at Christmas, so it has been a good opportunity to use some up. I recommend you use good quality candied peel for this, usually sold in chunky pieces from a deli or health food shop, rather than that ready chopped stuff in tubs surrounded by gloopy syrup you find in supermarkets.

I did have to watch that the jam didn’t burn whilst I was boiling it to a set. As it cooked it turned to a beautiful deep orangy-red gelatinous consistency but it spat as it boiled. As both carrots and rhubarb are lacking in pectin, it is probably advisable to use jam sugar with pectin added or add extra pectin if you want a good set. I used half ordinary white sugar and half jam sugar, because I had some needed using up. What I have ended up with is quite a soft set but the taste is amazingly good. The recipe uses enough carrots to be ‘useful’ from the ‘using up a glut’ perspective and the jam isn’t overly sweet, so it makes perfect sense for canning. It would be ideal as a filling for jam tarts or Tigress’s thumbprint cookies or to fill a larger pastry case with the addition of an egg beaten into it then baked in the oven to set. A slice served with cream or mascarpone flavoured lightly with some ginger syrup from the stem ginger jar would work perfectly. All in all, it has been an unexpected success.

CARROT & RHUBARB JAM

Makes approx 1.5Kg (3lbs 5oz)

500g (1lb 2oz) carrots, peeled, topped and tailed
500g (1lb 2oz) rhubarb, washed and trimmed
1 unwaxed lemon
800g (1 3/4lbs) sugar (use jam sugar with added pectin for a stronger set)
60g (2oz) stem ginger (approx 4 balls)
150g (5oz) candied peel (any citrus or melon will do)

Finely grate the carrots and place in a pan with 500ml (3/4pt) of water. Finely grate the zest from the lemon, squeeze out the juice and place to one side. Chop the lemon halves, pith and all, into chunks and place them and any pips in a muslin bag tied closed with string or a knot and add them to the carrots. Bring to a simmer and cook with the lid on for 20 minutes, then remove from the heat.

Chop the rhubarb into 1cm (1/2in) sized cube pieces. If the sticks are thick I slice them lengthways once or sometimes twice before chopping into equally sized small chunks. Place the rhubarb in a bowl, add the lemon zest and juice and pour the sugar over it. Cover and leave for an hour or two until the juice starts to run from the rhubarb.
Tip the contents of the rhubarb bowl into a preserving pan and add the cooked carrots, cooking liquid and muslin bundle. Add the finely chopped stem ginger and candied peel cut into thin slivers. Heat slowly, stirring all the time until the sugar is completely dissolved, then turn up the heat bring to a rolling boil and cook until setting point is reached (this took me around 25 minutes). (Test for a set on a cold plate or use a jam thermometer.) Discard the muslin bag.
Pour into hot sterilised jars, leaving 1 – 2cm (1/2 – 3/4in) headspace, screw on the lids to fingertip tight and process for 10 minutes in a hot water bath. For more info about how to hot water process your preserves, refer to the guide here. Leave your jars until cold and don’t forget to label and date them.