Honeysuckle Honey

In yesterday's post we talked about honeysuckle and I mentioned that I would show you something that we learned to do with honeysuckle other that eat the nectar.  So why are we starting out showing you a ladder from an above-ground pool?  Well, read to the end.  It will all become clear in the end.

Above ground pool ladder

I searched around on the Internet and determined that you can actually make honeysuckle jelly.  Doesn't that sound interesting?  I thought so.  The recipe I found calls for 4 cups of loosely packed honeysuckle flowers. Tricia, Benjamin and I went out to the woods and quickly picked 4 cups of flowers off the honeysuckle vine.

4 cups Flowers

I put them in a colander and rinsed them off real good.

I got 4 cups of water boiling in a saucepan and then turned off the heat and poured all the honeysuckle flowers into the pot.  

Into the boiling water

Stir them up, put the lid on the pot and allow them to steep like tea for about 45 minutes.  Every once in a while remove the lid and stir.  Wow!  The fragrance that fills the kitchen is incredible!

Steeping honeysuckle flowers

Then pour through a strainer sieve to separate the flowers from the liquid.

Removing the flowers from the liquid

Out of four cups of flowers, this is all that's left.  I'll put this in the compost pile.

Honeysuckle flowers for the compost pile

Here is the honeysuckle infusion that we're left with

Honeysuckle Infusion

Now, take 2 of those four cups of infusion and return to the saucepan with the setting on medium high.  Add a quarter cup of lemon juice and 4 cups sugar to 2 cups of the honeysuckle infusion and keep stirring.  Once it comes to a boil, stir until the boil can't be stirred down.  Then add 1 box of Sure Jell and boil for an additional 2 minutes. 

Adding sugare and lemon juice and later, SureJell

Use a ladle and canning funnel, pour into the half pint jars.  Put gaskets, lids and rings on and submerge into a water bath canner for five minutes. After that, remove and set on a canning rack for cooling.  To me the color of this soon-to-be jelly is doing its best to imitate summertime sunshine.

Honeysuckle jelly on a cooling rack

The next morning I checked on the jelly, and...  None of it jelled!!  I was expecting jelly and it is instead about the consistency of honey.  What a disappointment!

Honeysuckle Honey

Unfortunately, not everything we try works out.  In fact quite a few things we try fail, but we keep on trying and we keep on learning.  We don't let any learning experiences go to waste.  We try not to let anything go to waste.  Which brings us to the ladder to the above ground pool you see below.  Someone discarded this ladder on the side of the road, I presume, when their pool broke.  We re-purposed it and use it as a ladder to cross over the fence to the pasture.

Similarly, we won't throw the failed honeysuckle jelly away.  We'll call it Honeysuckle Honey and it will be used as a sweetener when we make Sweet Sun Tea.  It seems only natural that a flower that blooms on summer afternoons will be used to sweeten tea that you sip on summer afternoons.