The Hippest way to spend the day

Rose hips, that is.

This year, our Rosa Rugosa bushes kicked out an incredible number of these gorgeous globs of reddish-orange happiness.

Apparently, all parts of all roses are edible (except, of course, those that have been chemically treated with pesticides and such), including these funny little gifts of fruit.

What's this have to do with the way to spend a day? Well, today is my first day of summer. It's the first day that I'm off of work, the sun is blazing, the garden is booming and I have the entire day to do whatever I please.

So while I sipped on my second cup of morning coffee, I made a do-list of sorts:

And at the top, as you can see, is "make rose hip jam" and tell y'all about it. So I set out to pick the lot of them and get started.

A thorn in my plans?

Every rose has it's thorn?

A thorn by any other name still makes you bleed?

Well, lookout, anyway, when you pick these pretty suckers. I got a little carried away once or twice when I saw a particularly pretty berry and now I have perforated fingers.

I picked a bunch:

They're so pretty!

Next step: process. Rose hips are funny little beings. They have these giant sepals that create a stiff crown at one end, and the other end is where the spikes begin. Both of these have to be removed before you can proceed.

Here are the rose hips floating in rinse water after I sliced off the crowns. 

 Next step: seeds. Not just a few seeds, either. Copious amounts of furry, nasty, inedible and irritating seeds. 

Many sources direct you to cut each rose hip open and manually scrape them all out. But that would literally take you all day for 8 cups of fruit.

For example, these seeds all came out of one fruit:

So I have better way.  Stick the suckers in a blender with a bunch of water (you'll have to do this in batches), blend on low for about 10 seconds or so to chop up the fruits (without chopping the seeds too much) and go check your e-mail.

I mean, do something for a minute or so while the mixture separates out because, viola, the seeds float!

At this stage, you can spoon them off the top. A nice tip is when you're struggling to get the last few seeds, fill the blender to the top with water and scrape them off the surface with your fingers.

I filled this bowl with seeds from all the rose hips:

You can bet that those did not go in my compost pile.

After all that blending and seperating and skimming, you're left with this:

Which you then pour into a pot with the water you used to blend and boil it up for a long time.

Ah! Added bonus. I was hot and inspired, or just perspired, and desired some sweet iced tea. Instead of reaching for the mint tea bags, I took some water from my mixture here, strained off the pulp, sweetened it and poured it over ice. 

So, so good.
Guaranteed to satisfy your thirst and vitamin C requirement for a month.

At some point in all the boiling (after about an hour, I'd say), I added a bunch of sugar and some lemon juice. While that was going, I sterilized my jars

After it got to the jamming stage (a little after this picture was taken) I scooped it into the jars, screwed the lids on tight and processed them in a hot water bath for about 15 minutes.

I didn't add any pectin or gelatin so we'll find out how well it gels, but it sure is pretty!

This process takes a while, so I took advantage of the downtime and baked a loaf of bread to enjoy when the jam cools down. The recipe for this no-knead bread is in my archives.

But I caution you against trying it unless you don't mind gaining 10 pounds in a month. :)

I'll report back when we crack open the first jar!