4 in the morning

[smokingboot]

The man is asleep and the cats are asleep, and there is no room for a shifting and uncomfortable boot under the fur bedspread. So I have pottered round the house for an hour and finally find myself here, with the very hot very sweet coffee in the very cold night, rain outside, talking incessantly, encouraging me to go out, because it has a secret to share with me; if I pad out to the end of the garden, I'll find there's nothing there - I'll just be staring out at a mass of dark clouds swirling in the sky and at my feet. The full moon is out there somewhere, but it's hiding. They'll put the world back in the morning, at about 7 am, two hours away.

So here instead of any sense or savour is a recipe for a witch's jelly plus skeletons.

You need:

a small transparent jar,
two pints of water
3lbs caster sugar
and something like 50 open red (or red and pink) fragrant roses.

Boil the water and the sugar.
Add the juice of a lemon, and the rose petals, stir well, boil.
Add a bit of butter (unsalted)to clear the scum.
Simmer for an hour, during which time you...

grab the rose leaves, wash them, pick off any sharp pointy-pointies and start snipping them into tiny skeleton shapes, working along the central stem and veins, folding bits of leaf; your attempts may be a bit Blair Witch, but that's OK. If you are a villain, now's the time you name them. All the time you are doing this, you must return to the jelly every five minutes and stir, or it will be brown, and you want a luscious blood red for your skeleton people to quiver in.


Then cool, pop your skellies into the transparent jar (make sure they are standing up), pour over your jelly and cover it; there now. As a very gude witch indeed, you have surrounded your boney poppets in roses and fragrance. If you get peeved you can scoop them out later and eat them on scones. Very popular with children.

Happy Friday to you!

Comments

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

Where on earth do you get fifty open roses at this time of year, and not sprayed with fungicides etc?

I like the sound of this, although I fear my first attempt would be a disaster.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

you steal them from graveyards of course, or hire children to vandalise people's gardens, but only overgrown ones, where there's no evidence of any care, let alone pesticide... Or you buy organic ones yourself and plan for next year.

Or, if you are subtle and quick to anger, forget the rose thing and do it with crab-apples instead, which gives you a really nice clear green jelly looking fab with the skellies in it. Don't know the crabapple/sugar ratio though, and I suspect it's important: raw crabs taste like wasps sound.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

Crab apple jelly. Yum. I live across from an old orchard. *plans for next year*

Green pepper jelly would work as well, except I don't like it. :D

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Green pepper jelly? I never heard of it before... Is that the herb or the uh, vegetable thingy? I would like to blame my Britishness for my culinary ignorance but the truth is, I have lots of friends here who can cook, I'm just rubbish at it myself!

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

It's the vegetable, spiced up with one or two jalapenos. A friend makes it and I give it to my mother. I keep the rosemary jelly and the sage and apple jelly. :D

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Rosemary jelly, and sage and apple jelly sound glorious.
My herb garden is doing quite well, in particular the sage and rosemary...if we are still here next year, I might give herby jellies a go. Rosemary twig skellies have got to be feasible if a bit crunchy.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

Rosemary jelly is powerful stuff. It's honey-coloured and delicious with lamb sausages. The sage and apple jelly is rose-coloured. I like rowan and apple jelly, too, but no one here makes it. Ditto elderflower jelly. Since I'm a lazy sod, I never make anything. I rely on friends and relatives to supply me with jellies, chutneys and damson jam. :D

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty lazy too, but ready to experiment, provided it's not with anything anyone else has to eat. Pootling around with jams and jellies that may/may not work is OK. Actually creating a meal for people would throw me (and most of them!) into a total panic.

[delvy.livejournal.com]

Winter Roses? They are rarer these days but I remember my gran used to have several vigorous rose bushes that always seemed to be flowering in the bitterest weathers.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

We usually have roses flowering until Christmas--later if we don't have frost--but our climate is warmer than northern England (on average). I'd feel guilty plucking blossoms in winter.

A rose in winter

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

From Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall:


'This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear; the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look [...] it is still as fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. Will you have it?'

Re: A rose in winter

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

it seems a bit mean-spirited to point out that the rose that withstood frost and cold winds and little sunlight and too much rain has been thoroughly ko'd by being yanked out of the soil and placed in the hands of humans.

But there you go; proof that passion is at least as cruel as nature!

Все прикольно сделано!

[olpeusogy.livejournal.com]

Отлично. Ждем новых сообщений на эту же тему :) (http://site-sex-znakomstva.ru/)

Спасибо за инфу

[daymit.livejournal.com]

Большое спасибо! Взял себе может пригодится. (http://7wp.ru/)