Move Over, Ma Ingalls

A secret part of me has always nursed a fantasy that one day I would be chosen to go back in time, to travel the Oregon Trail in a Conestoga wagon.  My mom took pains when I was young to make sure I knew how to do household tasks.  I was taught how to sew a button and hem pants. I learned to clean and cook and bake.  I even learned how to cross-stitch, a skill worthy of any burgeoning attorney.  

To be honest, these days I still enjoy at least sewing and cooking.  Plus, I LOVE a good living-history museum.  I even loved the Little House On The Prairie TV series, and would continue to watch it in reruns, if my daytime TV viewing minutes weren’t already commandeered by a certain explorer and her little monkey friend. 

So this summer, seeing as I have all this free time on my hands (wait, what?), I took it upon myself to make jam.  Not just refrigerator jam, which I have successfully made before, but real jam, where you boil the jars and everything.  I’m not sure why I pick up hobbies like this on such a whim, it never really ends well for me.

So sometime in June, I went to my local library for a book about making your own preserves and home canning.  I schlepped off to Walmart to buy mason jars, and the world’s largest pot to boil them in.  I made extensive lists detailing what I would can based on when the various fruits came into season over the course of the summer.  My daydreams involved lining my basement shelves with a myriad of jewel-bright jars.  I could even gift them, right? RIGHT?

Well, the first things to ripen were strawberries, and seeing as we had a pretty wet June, they were a little later than usual to arrive.  No matter.   I picked up several pints of berries, along with a sack of sugar and some of those little packets of pectin, and I was on my way. 

How NOT to can:

1. Sterilize all your canning equipment in boiling water.
2. Hull all your strawberries.
3. Realize you don’t have nearly enough sugar to make jam.
4. Go to bed.
5. Buy sugar in the morning.
6. Re-sterilize the canning equipment.
7. Mash up berries and sugar in a pot on the stove. Heat them to boiling.
8. Watch the substance in pot try to reach a boil.
9. Watch it.
10. Watch it.
11. Wonder why everything in your pot has gone pink and foamy.
12. Decide maybe that’s what “boiling” is, and start plopping the hot, pulpy, concoction into jars.
13. Under-fill each and every jar.
14. Boil filled jars, at a simmer, for several minutes.
15. Forget about the jars for a moment, to catch the ending of Little House On The Prairie.   It turns out Sylvia dies.  Poor Albert.
16. Remove jars from the water, and place them on a tea-towel on the counter to cool.

The result? Eight jars filled with an almost bitter-sweet "jam" with only a hint of the over-cooked strawberry that was its namesake, topped with an inch of crystalline jelly-sugar for that added zing.

I don’t have to worry that I’ll die of dysentery.  I’ll probably die of botulism first.

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This post also appears at Lovelinks.  Check it out!!