Apple Scrap Jelly

and raisins

I made a raisin challah last week, actually I made three for two different Happy New Year meals, it’s the Jewish holiday season.

All (or most) of the celebratory food

is sweet, for a sweet new year. Mainly we dip apples in honey, but also put raisins in the challah and I threw some figs in with the roasted carrots. Highly recommend.

I personally made the raisins

to go in the challah, which I mention because it sounds super impressive, however it just means that I had past-due grapes, and I put them in the oven at 190F overnight and when I woke up in the morning they had almost completely raisined, but I gave them another two hours to fully raisin, and then mixed them into my regular challah recipe.

On the heels of this success,

I was motivated to try an Apple Scraps Jelly recipe that I scrolled past on Instagram, where you save all your peels and cores and boil them and add sugar and bottled lemon juice and voila, especially since with all the apple and honey dipping (and apple cake making) I was rich in apple scraps.

I couldn’t get the syrup to boil

as high as I needed it (I still don’t know exactly why), and I burned myself when straining the almost-boiling peel liquid into another pot, but g-ddam it, I now have six mini-jars of apple jelly cooling in my refrigerator.

I am telling you this because a couple of weeks ago

I was at a brunch and the topic came up of how do you fill your day.

Huh?

How could you possibly be on the search for things to do when there are grapes to raisin and apple cores to jelly?

Does this mean that you have zero food waste? That you don’t have Instagram? That you don’t like fruit?

If your food budget is tight, DIY projects are even more important! You can make your own bread, your own pita, your own hamburger buns (haven’t tried that one yet, but it’s on the bucket list).

Maybe cooking isn’t your thing,

maybe you’re more of a gardener. Or a weight lifter. Or a home-improvement-er.

There are always more things to do and to try.

If you are feeling out of ideas,

you don’t have to come up with one on your own. Look on your phone. Ask your friends and family. Listen to co-workers talk about their weekends. Heck, even characters on TV have projects and side-quests.

Maybe you watch someone make dioramas out of cereal boxes, and you think, “Hey I have cereal boxes.” Maybe you watch someone walk across New York City and you think “Hey, I’ve never walked across my city. I didn’t know urban hiking was a thing.”

Persistence means keeping going on your writing, for sure.

And depending on where you are in your writing, maybe you have no business boiling apple scraps this week.

But if you are looking for ideas to keep yourself going

or to fill your days, may I recommend that you start in your own home. The answer might be right in front of you.

Happy New Year.

Photo by Matheus Cenali on Unsplash