I am definitely a morning person, even though I complain waking up with my kids at 5 or 5:30am a few times a week. Let’s say my ideal time to wake up would be 6:30am, and there is definitely a difference between those two hours…like the sun being out😀
In any case, I am someone who always, somehow amongst the chaos of the mornings, sits down for atleast 10 minutes to drink coffee (mostly made in this small coffee press) and a rotation of small, quick breakfasts. Leftover yogurt cake from Shabbat (usually toasted), oatmeal with a bit of local honey (mostly in the winter), yogurt with granola, or a piece of good quality bread with butter and either jam or honey. I used to purchase regularly the famous Bonne Mamon French Jam (which they sell regularly in Israeli supermarkets), and a bonus was their beautiful glass container which I still love and reuse.
But as soon as I realized I could make a quick jam from mostly any seasonal fruit quite fast, I started just making my own, first experimenting with figs and apricots over the summer. It takes a few times not to overcook it, but the general idea is the same:
1 cup of over ripe fruit
1 cup of sugar
A good squeeze of a half of a lemon
Bring to a boil and then cook on a low flame for about hour and a half, but stir often and check regularly on a glass plate whether the jam is finished. When the jam it is done, it won’t run on a glass plate.
Obviously this recipe can be doubled, tripled, etc. But it has worked everytime and the jam lasts a good 2-3 months in the fridge. Fresh, fast and easy.
The truth is I wasn’t planning to use a winter fruit so early in the season, but we had some persimmons left over from the Sukkot holiday which ripened very fast, and I was already out of summer jam, so here you have it.
Cooked it for about 1.5 hours and it was ready to go.
3 regular size persimmons were 1.5 cup.
And why do I call it Rural Persimmon Jam?
Rural is a term my husband and I use whenever we cook something and we chop it very roughly and sometimes don’t even peel whatever we are using. We just kind of rinse it and throw it in a pot and there you go.
I called this jam rural because I just cut up the persimmons very fast and chunky, and didn’t peel them. The skins give the jam a nice texture and they feel almost candied, but of course you can peel them before for a smoother jam.
Rural soup, rural pesto, and rural jam👍
Quick and made with a lot of love.
So there you go. Easy rural jam. Can be used with most seasonal fruits-apricots, peaches, nectarines, figs, persimmons, pears, etc.
I even had a little visitor the next morning who ended up stealing my breakfast 😮
Enjoy and happy to hear your favorite fruit jams that you make at home.
Have a great week😀
Modest Jerusalem 