Homemade Raspberry Jam and Blueberry-Lemonade Jam, y’all!
(Alternate title 1: Raspberry Beret)
(Alternate title 2: My Brand of Crazy)
(Alternate title 3: Blueberries for Salmon Rushdie) (No – that’s too obscure a reference, and doesn’t really make any sense.)
(Alternate title 4: In which our intrepid cook rants and rambles about poultry plumping, veers into accusations of conspiracy at the farmer’s market, then eventually makes a big effing mess for no real reason besides a bargain.)
(Alternate title 5: In which our intrepid blogger realizes that she’s getting awfully wordy, and these posts may be getting too long entirely, but it’s absolutely pissing down rain today and I don’t have anything else to do, so please bear with me.)
It all started with a simple trip to the grocery to buy some chicken. I wanted to make chicken salad yesterday – something I’ve done hundreds of times. Just bake some chicken, throw in some celery, and mix with mayo. I could do it in my sleep. But after visiting Kroger’s, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Meijer’s, and Costco it become clear – there is no actual chicken left in my city. Every package I picked up eagerly, shamelessly informed me that the meat-product had been “enhanced” by “up to 15%” chemical nonsense. Don’t get me started. This topic makes me too angry to write about eloquently. Let me just state a few things: I want to buy chicken with my hard-earned money – not salt water. I don’t want to have to pay extra for the privilege of having my chicken NOT be assaulted and injected with sodium. And finally this “enhancement” (ah, sarcastic quotes – my favorite punctuation) can raise the sodium content of the meat up to ten times.
A quote from Notinmyfood.org: “A 4 oz. serving of plain, non-enhanced chicken might have 45 to 70 mg of sodium. But the ‘enhanced’ version? Up to 440 mg – about 20% of the recommended daily limit, and that’s before an unwitting chef takes It home to season it even further.” Anyhoodle, I’m not writing about chicken today. I have to drop it for the time being, because what I did end up doing is even crazier than eating lab-created Frankenchicken. I’ll just leave it at this – caveat emptor.
Instead, a miracle happened. Fresh seasonal fruit was on sale at an amazing price – cartons of raspberries were only one dollar! This almost never happens, since I’m usually limited to big chain shopping (due to budget, location, laziness, etc.) Even our farmer’s market fixes their prices. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but if a carton of strawberries is $2.99 at the grocery chains, they’ll probably be $3.49 at the farmer’s market. At every booth. There’s not going to be a single farmer with a bumper crop who drops the price on his fellow competitors, even if he could afford it. That’s fine and fair, and good for them for supporting each other. And those berries will be so much better than the acidy white ones at the grocery that it’s completely worth it.
But one dollar! A single smackaroo! And they were lovely – plump and juicy. Next thing I knew, five cartons had jumped into my basket. Well I guess I’m making jam today.
Preparing the troops.
Of course this prompts a veritable smorgasbord of cleaning. I need counter space. I need clean pots. I need clean towels. I need clean everything. I set a stock pot to boiling and sterilize all my jars, lids, rings, and utensils.
7 cups of raspberries go into the pot. Traditional recipes call for an equal amount of sugar, but that’s a whole honking lot of sugar, so I halve it. (I have a knack for this somehow – I’ve never yet had a jelly that didn’t gel. Pure instinct and dumb luck.)
Two tablespoons of powdered pectin and a two tablespoons of lemon juice get added, then start mushing. Somehow, somewhere, maybe in a move, I lost my potato masher, so I do my best with a spoon. The berries release their juice and I end up with this.
Now here’s where my brand of crazy gets a chance to shine. All of my jars are tiny. I don’t know what happened to my reasonably-sized ones. These jars will hold approximately one sandwich-worth of jam. I decide I need more jars, so I’m off to the grocery as my husband (probably) rolls his eyes behind my back. I return with the following:
One dozen pint jars
One container of lemon juice
Four cartons of blueberries
Five pounds of sugar
One container of pectin
I will say in my defense only one thing: the blueberries were $1.50! I couldn’t pass them up. I really couldn’t. And I was almost out of sugar and pectin, and completely out of lemon juice. Everything kind of snowballed from there. We’re lucky I didn’t end up in the backyard planting an apple tree and building a cider press.
Ahem.
The raspberries get heated slowly until boiling. Boil one to two minutes, stirring constantly to keep the sugar from burning. Then it’s a simple (excruciatingly messy) matter of filling the jars, then boiling them for ten minutes in a water bath to seal them.
Eight cups of blueberries get a buzz in the blender, then the same steps get repeated, upping the lemon juice to half a cup. (So I can have a fancy-named jam, you see. Blueberry Jam is boring. Blueberry Lemonade Jam is adorable.)
More filling, boiling, and sealing follow, and now it’s four hours later, my back and legs are aching, and I have lots and lots of jam! (I also managed to make chicken salad somehow. I’m not sure how, except I may have some sort of super power.) I’m sticky and exhausted but quite happy. Here’s where most food-types would tie a gingham ribbon around the jar necks and attach handmade wooden tags that say something like “Made with love!”, but I’m a-gettin sleepy, so I just write on them with a Sharpie.
illdothedisheslater 