Guavas Galore

When we first moved in here we didn’t realize that there was a guava tree on the property, and for the last three years it hasn’t produced any fruit. Earlier this year it was starting to flower, but then much to our dismay the lawnmower gang gave it a severe ‘pruning’, chopping off most of the main branches. Anyway, the tree not only survived this brutal attack, but has flourished and is now producing lots of nice, big guavas.

We now have more guavas than we can eat, and the house is full of the sweet smell of ripe guavas, so we decided to make some guava jam. Neither of us have made jam before, and didn’t really know what we were doing, but we hade a couple of recipes to follow, so decided to have a go.

We completely underestimated how much fruit we had and therefore how much sugar we would need, but after a morning of preparing the fruit, a quick trip to the shop for another bag of sugar then boiling up our brew we had a pot full of guava jam. We weren’t sure if it was quite ready, it didn’t seem to be meeting the ‘set test’ as described in the cook book, but it smelt and tasted pretty good, so we decided it was ready.

The other challenge for us was trying to find jars or some type of container for our jam. After searching all the local shops all we could find were plain drinking glasses that were about the right size, but of course these have no lids. These were all we could find, so we decided we would have to make do. After searching the internet we read about various ways of sealing jam jars without screw on lids, including wax, silicon, waxed paper, cellophane etc. None of these things we could get here in Samoa, so we figured we would put our jam into our glasses, let it cool, and then cover it with glad wrap.

We are happy to report that not only does the jam taste great, but the glad wrap seems to be working ok. I don’t think that this is a very good solution if you want to keep your jam for a long time, but somehow I don’t think that this jam will last too long anyway!