Autumn Olives

A couple of weeks ago, Luke and Dante rode their bikes from our house along the airline trail to the beaver pond on River Road in Colchester. Lucia and I packed a picnic and joined them. Dante took a pretty nasty spill in the sand that collects at the bottom of our hill (can you spot his bloody knee?) but he soldiered on the rest of the way.
These berries are called Russian or Autumn Olives. We have a tree of these in our yard, and are starting to notice them everywhere. These Dante are holding aren't quite ripe -- hence the pucker. Last week we went on a hike to the old landing strip on the other side of the airline trail and collected 18 cups of these berries!

We made 2 batches of jam out of them. The second batch didn't really set (I think because I cut back on the sugar from 3.5 cups to 2 cups) but it makes a nice applesauce-consistency that still spreads well on toast, and would be good on pancakes, and even things like squash. I found the recipe for the jam here but I'm going to paste it below in case this woman kills her blog.

Recipe for Autumn Olive Jam

* Gather 8 cups of ripe autumn olive berries. (In New England the pick date is near Sept. 25)
* Add 1 cup of water to the 8 cups of berries and bring to a boil then simmer for 20 minutes. Run the mash through a sieve and you will have about 5 cups of pressed fruit.
* Measure out 3 ½ cups of sugar. Take ¼ cup of the measured sugar and mix it with the contents of a package of no-sugar-needed pectin. Mix it in with the pressed fruit and bring to a rolling boil. Add the remainder of the sugar to the boiling liquid and return to a rolling boil and let it boil for one minute.
* Then can according to canning directions and cool.
I ended up with a little more than six 8 oz. jars of well set jam. Nice and tart, beautiful ruby red color.