I have 37 jars of preserves and chutney now. I think that I’ll make one more batch of the apple preserves… and call it a week.
I have concluded that canning jam is pretty much the
ultimate SHE activity.
1. SHE’s love the idea of homemade gifts and homemade foods… We love that whole “Little House on the Prairie” home timey idea of “simplicity”. We love the idea of making things from scratch. We love that it is organic and from our own “garden”. We love that back to the land thing and being “self sufficient”.
2. It involves “free” resources, like fruit growing on our own land. SHE’s hate to waste things… that is why we end up with clutter… because we think things like “I could use this for something… don‘t know what… but it is good for something”. “Free” fruit is too good to pass up. We see all this fruit and think, “OMG… I shouldn’t let it go to waste! It is FREEEEE!”
3. Making jam involves averting crisis… Like “All the fruit is ripe TODAY!!! OMG!!! Tomorrow will be too late… and the fruit will no longer be ripe… it will be rotten!!!” SHE’s love crisis… crisis cleaning… crisis fruit processing…
USUALLY the day of CRISIS and “OMG!!! I HAVE to do something with this fruit… NOW!!!!”… it is generally THE hottest day of the year… and this is also very SHE… to pick a project that involves 3 pots of boiling water and jam for hours at a time and then HAVE to do it on the hottest day of the year. Nothing like bringing the temperature of the house up to 127 degrees with 127% humidity. Although, this IS a good way to have your wallpaper peel off the wall…. Unless you HATE your wallpaper and WANT it to peel off… then it won’t work. I know.
I am WAY lucky this year, as we are having a cold spell.
3. It is a multi step involved project. SHE’s love that kind of thing. Nothing simple. We love the idea of simplicity… but only if it is a long involved complicated PROJECT.
4. It involves buying lots of stuff… to go with the “free” fruit. I had a BUNCH of jars and lids and stuff… but had to buy more. Have bought:
3 cases of jars (with lids and rings) $30
4 boxes of pectin $20
A box of lids $3
7 lbs of sugar $7
3 lbs raisins $12
4 onions $4
A bag of mustard seeds $3
$79 to make “free” jam… (good thing I already owned the canner caldron thing and the funnel… SHE’s LOVE storing equipment that is only used 1 day a year… well, in my case… it is going on 3 days…)
4a. We love it even more if we don’t have this “stuff” and have to make an emergency trip(s) to the store… Jam is the PERFECT SHE project… because to start… all you really need is your “free” fruit and a knife and cutting board and whatever sugar you have in the house. You have the thought, “I’ll make jam!!!” and go at it.
Thus, you can start the project and THEN panic and realize that you have to run to the store and buy stuff…(SHE’s love an urgent situation and crisis [refer back to number 3]). Nothing like having a bunch of fruit cut up… and on the stove cooking and realize… uh oh!!… I need to go to the store. Of course… all the SHE’s whose fruit was ripe LAST week have already run to the store and bought up all the supplies… thus *I* had to go to 3 stores.
4b. SHE’s love buying the “wrong” thing… one of my cases of jars were quarter pint size jars. I THOUGHT that they were half pints. They LOOK like half pints. I didn’t even KNOW that they made quarter pint “jelly jars”. It SAID “Jelly Jars” on the package (but has the size in a font size of about 1 or maybe 2). Who the heck buys jars with one serving of jam???? I mean, who buys them on purpose? obviously some of us buy them on accident.
1/4 pint jars are only good if you are fishing for sturgeon and cutting out the eggs and canning caviar… OK… homemade jam IS “special”… but not THAT special… I mean it isn’t caviar. It is made by panicking SHE’s with “free” fruit that is on the verge of going rotten. It isn’t that special that you must ration it out in jars that hold 2 (heaping) tablespoons.
Thus, in typical SHE fashion… I have 12 useless jars… that I hope that I have the receipt for and I hope the store will take back… since I ripped into the box like a mad SHE woman with a pan of bubbling jam half made on the stove.
5. I have the
perfect SHE fruit to make this SHE jam. The plums are a little too ripe… thus some of the plum jam is lacking in pectin and is more like syrup… but other than that… the plums are not too bad. Plums don’t involve peeling. Cut them in half and pull out the pit. And they are pest free. Not too much work. Of course the fruit that isn’t too much work is almost gone…
The apples… a whole other story. These are the ultimate SHE fruit. The apples require peeling. These apples are anywhere from golf ball size to… ummm… the size of an “apple”. I have discovered that it takes the same amount of time to peel a golf ball sized apple as it does to peel a basketball sized apple. Of course, you have to peel 263 golf ball sized fruit to equal one basketball. Most of my apples are a little bigger than golf balls… but smaller than tennis balls. And I underestimated… I don’t have 200 apples... I have HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of them.
I now know why apples are on the list of “fruits you should buy organic” and are the most heavily pesticide sprayed fruit out there. I spent one 15 minute time block and peeled and cut 13 apples… and ONE was pest free… and that one wasn’t yet ripe. Two apples were so contaminated… I had the throw them away… but you don’t know this until you peel it and cut it open. Only a SHE would think that it makes sense to fill the “Green bin” for garbage pick up with peeled and cut fruit. You all peel your garbage first, right?
We had a Granny Smith apple tree at the old house… and it NEVER had any pests. THIS tree at this house and these apples… MULTIPLE pests… ants, worms, other unidentifiable “things”. I think that maybe my tree is solely responsible for the Brown Apple Moth infestation in the Bay Area. I’ve never seen a Brown Apple Moth… couldn’t identify it… but I’m pretty sure that the larva are growing and thriving in my apples.
Oh… and every apple has at least one bruise or two…
Back to the SHE thing… so I peel and quarter the apples and hack off the bruises and cut away at the pestilence (since I have apple pests on the magnitude of a biblical plague). And after 15 minutes… I have peeled and quartered 13 apples (but had to throw away 2) and have 23 bites of apple for my work… and not Rachel Ray shoving half a 2 lb burger in her mouth bite… we are talking Giada bites. Or the queen of England at a state dinner bite. 23 tiny pieces of apple.
5a. Oh… and the apple tree hates me. First off…being a SHE (me, not the tree)… the tree isn’t pruned. (And I SAW the garage before we bought this house and the people before us DEFINITELY were SHEs and put the house on the market after crises cleaning… thus THEY didn’t prune the tree, either.) So the tree has branches that grab you and poke at your eyes… AND it throws apples at you, while you are standing under it.
I’m hoping Susan’s son is young and naive and we can slap a bike helmet on his head and I can pay him a penny an apple to throw the downed apples in the green bin… but probably not. My own kid (who is a teenager) has never gone on the side of the house as he says it is “Too Scary”… sort of like the forest in the Wizard of Oz. It is sort of “dark” and our psycho mean cat hangs out there. Ds also has a rational (and irrational) fear of ALL flying insects, both stinging and non-stinging… bees, moths, yellow jackets, butterflies, wasps … and when we bought the house there was an old wasp next over there… thus… ds won’t go into that part of the yard.
I, of course, have not yet picked up the 2,300 pieces of downed fruit as I’m too busy peeling it, cutting it up, cooking it, running to the store buying for supplies for it, and typing about it…
6. The whole jam making process is pretty much “a disaster waiting to happen”. ( OMG! How SHE is that?!?!?!)
Every step of the way… I think “this is a disaster waiting to happen!”. Thought that as I was carrying a bowl with 15 lbs of plums from the back door, across the (NEW!) living room carpet to the kitchen. Being a SHE… the bowl should probably hold 10 pounds of fruit… but I had it overflowing with much more. (Nothing happened… and now… I take “the long way” and go around the house, thru the garage, and directly to the kitchen.)
Jam also involves big pans of sticky, bubbling, hot mess…
I have TRIED to be sooooo good about not slopping it everywhere. Really, I have! I have tried to wipe up every spill as it happens (oh… and I‘ve made a couple of loads of laundry, too… SHE‘s love to make secondary messes/work/projects… like making jam creates a GIANT stove cleaning project AND a laundry project).
But the messes have kind of got ahead of me. I am losing the battle. I might have to buy a new stove… although I kind of like the smell of burning sugar every time I on a burner. In typical SHE fashion, I’m thinking thoughts like, “Well, EVENTUALLY all of the spills on the stove will burn away, right?”
I have been very, very good about closing the drawers and dishwasher and such. I had a VERY bad disaster 3-4 years ago with spilling a pan of pea soup into a drawer. And I’ve sloshed about 6 cups of chicken grease out of a pan onto the floor once (I don’t know WHAT was up… but roasting two chickens made a HUGE amount of juice and grease…)
But I’ve had several, “Uh Oh… this is a disaster waiting to happen…!!” thoughts and I think that that spilling 7 pints of chutney or jam into a drawer is going to make the pea soup disaster look like small potatoes. Not only will I need a new stove… I’ll need an entire kitchen remodel. (Remodel will be done SHE style… dh and ds (who are BOTH SHE’s) will decide that it will be a good project for THEM… lasting 4 years and 7 months… and costing 5 times what a professional contractor would charge to do it... Just add this onto to the price of the “free” jam…)
7. The Jam Project is inspiring thoughts of MORE fun projects… like a Bread Baking Project… ‘cause the homemade jam is just calling out for homemade bread… or a Cow Project… like buying a cow and making homemade butter… It is a very SHE thing to be waist deep in one project that is taking all of my self control not to destroy the kitchen… and then to think… Oooooo!!! I could make bread and butter, too!!!! and other projects that can mess up the kitchen and cost money in the long run, (like owning a cow will save us money?).
(Actually… I think we SHOULD meet in Modesto… Lori can bring the SHE bread… and I’ll bring SHE jam… and Michelle can bring paper plates and Susan can bring butter…)
8. SHEs always think “I could make money at this!”… well actually I didn’t… but DH did say that, “OMG!!! This apple jam is so good!! You could SELL it!!!”
$79 in supplies
$300 for new stove top
$200 for electrician to install stove top
$379,000 kitchen remodel
Each jar is only $10,258.19 - not including my time. Yes!!!! I SHOULD make jam and sell it… we would be RICH!!! Just think!! ten thousand dollars a jar! Ooooo… another project… I can build a Jam Stand in the front yard!
One GOOD thing… despite the fact that the kitchen isn’t perfect… I HAVE been empting and reloading the dishwasher… AND my kitchen was in shape enough that I made dinner last night and didn’t send dh out for fast food (although, not being a cured SHE… I thought about it…). Made KD’s seared chicken and plum sauce. DH like the plum sauce so much he asked for seconds.
OK... going to cut apples for an hour before I have to pick ds up from summer school (DS being an All or Nothing SHE… flunked geometry and is now getting an A in it in summer school. But to REALLY, REALLY do the SHE Jam thing properly… I should have 5-6 elementary aged children “helping” me and passing on the SHE Jam tradition on to… (of course, in real life… the kids are whinny and very UNhelpful… but in SHE fantasy land… they are grateful for the opportunity and we are joyfully making jam together a la “Little House on the Prairie” style… the books… not the TV show…))
Back to the apples… I’m peeling and cutting apples outside since I can just hose off the table and not worry if the peels and cores and pests fall on the "floor".
Denise
