Fruit salad jam: a recipe to avoid waste

The background story is on my other blog, 'Diary of a Teacher' (do go and read).  Suffice it to say I had a lot of fruit left over after making fruit salad at school so I made jam.

This is the recipe.

Fruit salad jam

Ingredients:
apples (eating)
bananas
pears
kiwi fruits
oranges
plums (not part of the original salad but the other day they were reduced in Morrisons and I know why now - they were never going to ripen.  Not good for snacking, great for jamming because they're moderately high in pectin so that's what I used them for!)
water
preserving sugar (or ordinary granulated) - see below for amount.
possibly some lemon juice

Method
All the fruit had been prepared for fruit salad beforehand which was nice and saved a lot of time for me.

Pile all the fruit in a maslin pan, add some water (I added enough so that the fruit was 2/3 covered - it wasn't a lot).  Bring to a simmer and cook for a while until; the fruit is mushy and soft.  It took about 30 mins as it was a very gentle simmer.

Then push the lot through a mouli or a fine sieve.  The mouli allowed a few kiwi seeds through which looks very nice.  A sieve would give a much smoother texture and no little black specks.

Weigh the sieved fruit and return to the wiped-around maslin pan.  For each kilo of gloopy fruit, add around 65-70% of preserving sugar.  My fruit came to just under 1.5 kilos and I added 1 kilo of sugar.  All the fruit was sweet so I wasn't going for the weight for weight method.

Stir well and leave for the sugar to dissolve in the warm fruit.  I left mine overnight at this point as I was feeling rather tired by then.

Before boiling put two saucers in the fridge (if you check for set this way - I always do), wash the jam jars and place on a tray in a warm oven

Heat the fruit/sugar mixture to a rolling boil, stirring often.  It's pretty gloopy so take care with hot jam spitting.  After boiling for five minutes, take the pan off the heat and check for set.  If it hasn't reached setting point, boil for another five minutes, remove from heat and check again.  I had decided that if it hadn't set after three checks I would add lemon juice but I didn't need to.  It was nicely set at the third check.

After setting, spoon off any scum (there wasn't any this time), ladle into hot jars and seal.  Allow to cool, label and store in a dark place until needed.

It does taste good and I've called it fruit salad jam.