I leaned against my coworker’s door frame and posed this question: “Cherry-rhubarb or strawberry-balsamic?“ My co-worker, Wally the Bunny (her chosen nom de plume) picked cherry rhubarb, knowing I was talking about jam. After experimenting with pastas, pizzas, cheeses, and all manner of other nonsense, I may have landed on my true passion, which is sterilizing jars and making dozens and dozens of jams, pickles, and salsas during the summer months. Not the most interesting thing to write about, so I won’t bore you every week with another adventure in jar-boiling, but yesterday I was completely insane which you may find entertaining. Wally had work to do, so I didn’t bore her with the details of what fruit was on sale and where, and how I didn’t want to go to more than one grocery, since I also needed beer and blah blah blah. I agreed to make her chosen jam and headed off to shop.
Of course I then went to THREE grocery stores and decided to make three jams in one day – an unprecedented act of true bonkers-ness. I came home with two pounds of cherries, one and a half of rhubarb, four pounds of strawberries, some fresh thyme, five pounds of sugar, and two pounds of red peppers. (And beer, of course).
What follows is a day in the life of a crazy person.
7:30 a.m. – Fill up stockpot and start boiling water for jars. Sterilize many, many jars for all this jam.
8:30 – wash and chop three large red peppers. They have to be pureed, and I don’t want to deal with the food processor and the 19 extra dishes it creates. I try to use my stick blender, which fails spectacularly. I lug out all the parts of the food processor, including a new non-lethal blade acquired after my campaign of shock-and-awe against the company who issued a recall for over eight million faulty parts, promptly closed the factory for a month, then told me it could be up to eight months before I got a replacement part. Not cool. So I immaturely started harassing them via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Three weeks of acting like an asshole got this squeaky wheel some grease, and they sent me my blade early to shut me up. Success!
8:45 – begin boiling red peppers, vinegar, and sugar for jam #1 – Spicy Red Pepper Jelly. It is very sticky.
9:15 – fill jars and process in water bath. One down, three to go.
10:00 – Stem, then learn how to pit cherries. I try a toothpick, paperclip, etc. as recommended online. Nothing works. I think about getting a cherry pitter, but I’m afraid if I brought one more kitchen gadget into the house, it would collapse into a sinkhole and I’d drown in a sea of spatulas and garlic peelers. Also, Mr. Dishes will divorce me. Finally I discover my usually useless 1/8 tsp. measuring spoon acts as a perfect little pit-sized scoop and I more or less get the pits out without destroying the fruit too much. My neck starts to ache.
10:12 – Now I have to chop the cherries, so why the hell did I have to remove the pits so carefully?
10:15 – dice rhubarb in front of the TV, so I can catch the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy. Yes, I still watch it. Yes, I know you gave up in season five when everything got weird with the ghost sex storyline. Nevertheless, I persisted, because Kevin McKidd makes it all worthwhile. Also I just want to sit down.
10:45 – cherries and rhubarb need to macerate in sugar for an hour or so – rhubarb (or “pie plant”, in the Little House books) is sour and stringy unless treated properly. I don’t really know how to treat it properly, so I just throw sugar at it. My feet hurt.
11:45 – boil up jam #2: Cherry-Rhubarb, fill jars, process in the water bath. The kitchen is decidedly sticky now, and constant steam from the boiling stockpot has not done anything kind to my hair. I don’t frizz – I flop. But my pores are open, probably. I’m hungry. I drag my stringy hair and sore feet to the grocery, and intentionally avoid the produce section. I can’t do anymore. I just can’t. Not today. My legs are getting sore.
1:00 – wash and hull four pounds of strawberries for jam #3 – Strawberry Balsamic with Thyme from Serious Eats. (The other two recipes were clumped together from a bunch of ones I found online, so no credit given.) Also have to sterilize a few more jars, just in case.
1:04 – I go to the bathroom. There is a cherry stem on the floor. Why? How?
1:05 – I wash my hands. I’m not a monster, people.
1:15 – Mr. Dishes wanders in. He’s been wisely avoiding me all day, probably with his fingers crossed that I don’t have a panic attack/temper tantrum in the middle of all this, leaving him with a sink full of dishes, several boiling pots of nonsense, and a sticky, crying wife on the floor. He spends five minutes helping me crush strawberries with a potato masher. He does it wrong.
1:30 – I double the balsamic vinegar to make it more of a savory jam, since the balsamic-fig is such a big hit. I boil. I pluck tiny thyme leaves off the stem. I mix and boil. My back hurts.
1:45 – I arrange a photoshoot for www.harvestandhoney.com (a much better, prettier blog than this one) tomorrow at my BFF’s farm, where there are picturesque peonies, bee hives, peacocks, etc. I check the forecast – rain, rain, rain. Great.
2:15 – I text Ms. Harvestandhoney “I just put my last batch of ham in the bath to process.” She was like, “Damn.” I explain the auto-correct and assure her I’m not slaughtering animals in the backyard and processing meat in the bathroom. Yet.
2:18 – I realize I’m kind of a ridiculous person. I’m okay with that.
2:30 – I’m done. For once I did dishes as I went along (approximately 397 dishes, if I counted right), so I can sit some more. Sitting feels nice.
3:00 – I attempt a picturesque shot of my jams in the sunlight on the back deck. I can’t get the little satellite dish out of the shot – the old homeowners left it when they moved, so it just stays on the garage, until one day it will fall and kill a small animal. Whatever.
3:30 – I open a beer. Yes, it’s a little early but I earned it. I watch Netflix and relax.
6:30 – I drag my sore neck, back, legs, and feet out to dinner. As I limp through the parking lot, Mr. Dishes forbids me from making anymore jam this weekend. I have to agree. But I will check the Sunday ads to see what fruit is on sale…
illdothedisheslater 