Rhubarb Lemonade

Halved the recipe because of the size of my pan!  The full recipe is below, what I did is in itallics as usual!  I got this recipe from Allrecipes.com.

8 cups chopped rhubarb (4 cups)
3 cups sugar (1.5 cups)
3 tablespoons grated lemon peel
1.5 cups lemon juice (3/4 cup)
18 cups water (9 cups)



 
Combine the rhubarb, sugar, and grated lemon peel into a large saucepan and bring to a boil. 

Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the sugar has dissolved and the rhubarb releases its juice and starts to break up, about 10 minutes. 

Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice. 

Pour the rhubarb mixture through a fine sieve, pressing out as much liquid as possible. 

To serve, mix the rhubarb syrup with 18 cups of water (1 cup of syrup per 3 cups of water) and pour over ice.

I'm pretty sure I'll be using the pulp to make jam afterwards....waste not, want not! 

 

Rosehip Syrup

I popped round to a friend's house today because she has Rosehips growing and I'd never seen them before.  There, I admit it, purely nosey!

rosehip berries and flower

We did a swap, rhubarb for rosehip, both very happy (and one of her girls ran round with one stalk of rhubarb as an umbrella, it was so big!).

I had a look at some recipes and decided that I would save some of the seeds and see if I could get some to grow for us, and make Rosehip Syrup with the rest.  The recipe didn't say to take the seeds out and as it's going through a jelly strainer, I didn't see the point in deseeding all of them anyway.

So the recipe, as per usual, has in itallics what actually happened.

1kg Rosehips (550g)
3 litres of boiling water (1.5 litres)
500g soft dark brown sugar (250g soft light brown sugar)

Bring to the boil 2 litres of the water (1 litre).


Put rosehips in a food processor until it's a pulp, then add to the water. WooHoo, from here I followed the instructions!

     

Bring the water back to the boil, remove from heat and allow to steep for 20 minutes.







Pour all into a scalded jelly bag and allow the juice to drip through. Squeeze the bag to get as much liquid as possible.









Add the pulp back to a saucepan containing 1 litre of water (500 ml) and bring back to the boil. Remove from the heat and steep for another 20 minutes before straining through the jelly bag again.  Not bothering to take these photos..... I'm sure you don't need to see the same pics again (but if you do, just look up a bit!)

Add sugar to the strained rosehip liquid, dissolve, allow to simmer for five minutes, then pour into hot, sterilised bottles.

Makes approximately 2 litres (made 1.4 litres)

Rhubarb Cordial

one stalk = 486g!

I can't remember where I got this recipe from (not very helpful, I know!) but thought I'd give it a try because we have got a lot of rhubarb picked already and loads more growing!  There's only so much crumble one can eat!

I made rhubarb jam out of the leftover pulp - waste not, want not!

plus sugar

2kg Rhubarb chopped (one stalk weighed 486g!)

2 large Oranges
6 Star Anise (optional)
1.5 litres cold water
Citric Acid (optional to keep it for a long time, I couldn't find any) 

600g sugar

Boil rhubarb in water with 8 large strips of orange peel and juice of both oranges, leave to go to a pinky green mush.  

My pot wasn't big enough, so I did half at a time, I think I should have done it in 1/3 or 1/4 though.

Also, I think it must be the variety of rhubarb, because mine doesn't usually go pinky-green, so I just boiled it till it was mushy. 

 

 

 

 

Leave to cool. 

Yup, managed this step just fine!  Mental note:  Even halved, it's a lot of rhubarb, so it takes it's own sweet time to cool! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strain juice into another pan. 

I didn't have another pan, so I used my jam strainer & bowl and timed it right so that I went to work while it was dripping & I didn't have a chance to poke around and try and rush it! (I know me!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Put back on heat and add sugar and citric acid.  

1/2 batch pulp and juice separated

The instructions weren't 100% clear here, but I'm assuming it's just the juice I use and I just realised when I got to this point, that I didn't put in the star anise yet.  After a conflab with myself, I decided that I would use 3 star anise when I boiled up the second half of the batch, and then I'd have two different flavours (also not sure if I like star anise after whiffing the jar).

 

Put into bottles.  

 No problem!