Doing the Festive Season without palm oil

Yes, it’s in most things. It’s truly awful. I’ve ditched buying mincemeat in jars now after not being able to find any mince pies or mincemeat without palm oil. “Sustainable” palm oil isn’t good either. The planet can’t sustain this insatiable lust for the stuff. I can do without shop bought gravy granules, I can do without stock cubes. I can do without all the sugary biscuits and shortbread, I can do without buying that nice coffee cake I always used to get as a treat… But I can’t do Christmas without mince pies…

There’s always something you forget when you type a recipe off … I also used a two inch chunk of fresh ginger, finely chopped in this mix.

For the pear jam, I did this:

There was no way of taking a picture of the pulp going through a sieve, but that’s what I did. Then I returned the smooth pulp sans pips and etc to the pan and added sugar, heated to setting point and ladled into jars. The pear trees were in the park. Free fruit! While I was scrumping a guy in a suit stopped and asked me what I was doing. He went home to get a bag to collect pears in. I hope his jam turned out ok.