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Jamming in the Kitchen

One of my oldest and dearest friends in the world and I are nigh-telepathic. It happens over decades of friendship. It also tends to lead to things like conversations at midnight the day before July 4th where we decide we're going to learn how to make jam! and can it! and did you see this recipe?! we could do that! we're going to be so tired tomorrow!

36 hours later, we made jam. Thanks for the kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Bananabella's Parents!

Five glass jelly jars in a row, full of luminous pink-red jam lit from behind by a bright light that casts faint shadows on the pale counter.
I am in love with that color.
It's so pretty. I've been holding my jars up to the window to admire them almost every time I walk by the shelf.

Jam ingredients laid out on a white counter: a plate with a mound of chopped mango, a large glass casserole dish of blueberries, a silver saucepan full of whole strawberries covered with white sugar, a jar of maple syrup and a bottle of lemon juice, and a pyrex measuring cup of lemon juice.
There are two varieties of lemon juice in this picture, because of course we didn't check our recipes to try to reduce the number of ingredients.
We decided on super-traditional strawberry preserves, fancy blueberry-maple-syrup jam (the recipe warned it might prefer to be syrup, which was a possibility I was fine with), and mango preserves. Theoretically the mango was also jam, but it stayed steadfastly unmushed, so I'm calling it preserves.

A silver saucepan full of whole strawberries and pink-tinged white sugar on a glass stovetop, with a flat silver spoon being pulled out of the way of the photo.
This part works better when the stovetop is on.
The strawberries had to stew in vast quantities of sugar before being cooked down, to help release the juice and make them mash better. And for future reference, use a deeper pot than we did. The rising foam as the strawberries cooked down was a bit alarming, considering fruit lava is both very painful to humans and very hard to scrub off the stove.

Two glass jelly jars on tin foil being filled with foamy, red strawberry jam from a silver ladle. A silver saucepan full of jam is pulled up close behind the jars, and a red silicone oven mitt steadies the half-full jar as jam is poured in.
Unskimmed. We're not really going for aesthetic here.
Jams and jellies are prettier if you skim off the fruit foam before jarring them...but we did not have a skimmer, and didn't care that much, and—look, next time you pull a plan to try something you've never done before together in 36 hours starting at midnight, you let me know how well that goes. So there. Also on the list for next time are better jar-holding apparatuses, because those silicone gloves were not ideal for grabbing slick very hot full-of-fruit-lava jars. They did protect our hands, though.

A silver saucepan full of half-mashed blueberries, with a silver potato masher embedded in the goo. They're a not-terribly-appetizing mix of blue skins, green innards, and purplish bits.
"They look like eyeballs." Um...thanks...for that visceral image.
Blueberries had to be mashed, mixed with sugar and maple syrup, and left to think about what they'd done for an hour. Conveniently, the mango took for-ev-er to cook down appropriately, so it was done right in time to put the blueberry mash on the burner.

A silver pot with a deep layer of thick, cooked-down mango chunks at the bottom, with a flat silver spoon resting in the mango.
Mango!
It's a good thing there wasn't any vanilla ice cream in the house, or this might not have made it into the jars.

A silver saucepan full of deep-magenta jam at a rolling boil, with a thick mass of bubbles in the center.
"Stop stirring so I can take a picture." "I am saving us from a very painful death by fruit lava."
The blueberry smelled astonishingly good while it cooked down. It was also the only recipe that actually made the quantity of jam it said it would. The others were Very Conservative in their estimates, and it's a good thing Bananabella's parents keep jars on hand. I don't think we could have eaten that quantity of leftover jam in one sitting.

Three rows of glass jelly jars on a glass cutting board, with a very bright, white light behind them. The back row glows deep pink-red; the middle row looks opaque black-purple; and the near row is opaque, clear yellow.
Stubborn refusal to glow from the blueberry and mango.
Then we had to admire the fruits of our labors. And try in as many ways as we could think of to make light shine through them. The mango is forgiven, because it is at heart an opaque creature, but the blueberry is literally just too dark for even a camping lantern at full power held against it to make a difference.


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