There are some things that I have always been afraid to tackle as far as anything kitchen related goes. I’m a fairly decent (if overly lazy) cook (that’s improving), and an excellent baker…but when it comes to candy making? Nope, double nope, tried that once and it went terribly wrong…but even that is not as intimidated as canning, or jam making, or preserve or anything along those lines.
I have recipes for jam-making and such, but just looking at them has always given me a figurative headache. It was all too complicated, too precise…and then a customer changed all that with one little sentence:
Jam is easy, you guys carry freezer jam mix, go check it out don’t even have to boil it.
Huh?
Sure enough, there in the store’s canning aisle, are little packets of freezer jam pectin. The instructions on the back? Mix and let sit for half an hour.
Even I can do that.
Even so I put it off for a few days. Partially because I kept making excuses, and partially because one of those excuses was “can I really afford the ingredients?”. Then it turned out that we already had the jars, that I got the pectin packs on staff discount and that all I needed to do was choose the fruit. So I wanted into the grocery market next door on my lunch break with the vague idea of picking up a pound of blueberries to experiment with, but they – at first – didn’t seem to have the right amounts. So I went looking for something else…
And found loganberries.
There are only a handful of people who will understand the significance of finding fresh local loganberries anywhere. I have not had them in…almost twenty years, since I was picking them from the vine in the sun in my Gran’s garden. Loganberries – moreso even than raspberries – are the taste of summer, of croquet challenges and hammocks that always smell like the basement no matter how long you leave them outside. Loganberries are my Gran, and my childhood, and a whole bunch of other things all tied up into one tiny blackberry/raspberry hybrid. And they are not all that common.
I could have made the recipe with two pints…I bought all five.
And when I pulled them open there was that smell, which I hadn’t even remembered in so long.
And wouldn’t you know it? The jam appears to have turned out…
And I think…that Gran would be pretty happy about that.