A Summer Delight: Jammin’ With the Berries

On Wednesday, tired from a week that already felt a billion years long, I escaped from work.

Time for a walkabout!

An earlier escape from my computer to my friend’s house had added blackberries to my larder. A couple of years ago, he began inviting me to come up and pick over his blackberry bushes. I get one pick a year, and make the most of it. Blackberry jam lifts my peanut butter toast to bliss, and this recipe for blackberry frozen yogurt I discovered during the pandemic…. Well. Remember that one summer day when you were so hot you thought your insides might burst into flame? And your mom showed up with a bowl of freshly churned ice cream, littered with some sort of fruit but who cared because that cool sweetness rumbled onto your tongue and chilled your mouth before putting out that fire inside?

Yeah. It’s better than that.

So, I added a few of the blackberries I’d stored in the fridge to eat fresh (four quart-sized bags being in the freezer waiting for their turn at transformation) to some grocery store strawberries that needed to be used before mold snatched them away. The fuzz was beginning its foray, so I found a quick jam recipe online and got to work.

I quartered the strawberries that were still good and tossed the rest. A pint of blueberries joined the jam session.

Sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest completed the recipe. I stirred the mixture and cautioned myself not to cook too long. After all, I didn’t want to repeat my Marmalade Mistake and have Mixed Berry Candy! The recipe called for using a thermometer to monitor when the mixture got to 220 degrees. At that point, the jam would be set.

Brilliant!

The candy thermometer was in the bottom of a wooden wine box where I hold all of the extra gadgets that I rarely use. No time to dig through that pile!

Reminder to self: Put the candy thermometer into the close-and-handy drawer for unexpected jam-making.

Wait! A digital thermometer lives in my close-and-handy drawer. That would work fine!

I dumped it out of its plastic sleeve and hit the on button.

—

Thermometer: Hello! Oh, I’m so excited to be out of the drawer! What are we cooking today?

Me: Let’s see how hot this is….

Thermometer: Oh, wow! That’s warm. One-hundred-ninety degrees, 191, 192… Gosh, it’s still getting hotter. What are we cooking?

Me: It’s boiling but it doesn’t say 212 degrees? I wonder why that is?

Thermometer: This seems wrong. How warm do you need this meat to be? One-hundred-seventy degrees is well-done. For any animal. Why would you need to still be cooking?

Me: Is this going to gel? Or do I need to get it hotter?

Thermometer: I mean, really, this is getting out of control! Two-hundred-twenty, 211…

Me: Looks like it’s almost there…. What? What’s going on?

Thermometer: [flashing its screen, all numbers turning into eights] STOP COOKING! STOP IT! THE MEAT IS DEAD! DEAD AND BURNED! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? YOU’RE NO COOK! YOU’RE A MONSTER!

—

Startled, I zipped the thermometer out of the scalding jam and hit the power button to stop the diatribe.

The nerve! Telling me I’m a bad cook!

Reminder to self: Don’t use a meat thermometer to cook jam. Low temperature rudeness!

I let it calm down after its escape while I turned off the flame.

Once the thermometer panics, even if it is a meat thermometer, it’s time to put the jam in jars.

In a taste test, all three of the berries’ flavor shone through the combination, celebrating summer’s sweetness as it spread delightfully across my peanut butter toast.

Reminder to self: When the meat thermometer screams, the jam is perfect.

That’s a system that will work every time!

Image courtesy of LA Bourgeois