Pea Hull Jelly

The Boss said she would like to have some cucumbers for pickles, and so when The Husband and I got home from work yesterday, we went to the garden to pick some. By the time we left the garden, we'd picked cucumbers, peppers, squash, zucchini, a few tomatoes, purple hull peas, and green beans. We foisted the squash off on an aunt, gave the peas to Nanny, and brought the rest of the stuff to the house. By the time we finished snapping the green beans, it was too late to start canning, so we put everything in the refrigerator with the intention of processing it all after work today. The plan was to pressure can the green beans, make bread with the zucchini, and to make jelly with the hulls from the peas. Yeah, pea hull jelly. I won't post the recipe for the pea hull jelly, because recipes for it are all over the internet. They are all pretty much the same as far as ingredients and proportions. Another thing they have in common is that they don't tell you how much jelly the recipe yields. It takes 4 cups of pea tea (for want of a better phrase), a package of fruit pectin, and 5 cups of sugar, so I washed and sterilized ten half-pint jars. The jelly mixture is boiled for 15 minutes. By the time it cooked down, I wound up with slightly under 4 cups of jelly, which seems like a ridiculously small amount yield, considering that 9 cups of stuff went into the pot. In any case, the jelly is done, and it is pretty tasty. It looks and tastes like grape jelly. Go figure. When the oven buzzer goes off in a few minutes, our evening of canning/freezing/baking will have resulted in 4 loaves of zucchini bread, 7 quarts of canned green beans (and several pint bags that we froze), 4 pints of cream-style corn, and 3.9 half-pint jars of jelly. Not a bad haul. My feet are aching. Boy, am I glad we gave away those cucumbers.