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Saving the Sad Grapes

Grapes have a tendency to go...sad, in my fridge. I get a whole bag when they're on sale, and they're delicious, and then they get nudged aside and they end up sort of sad. And wrinkly. And they don't pop in my mouth anymore, and then I'm sad, too. The last time I bought grapes, I promised myself I wouldn't do that, and then I looked in the fridge the other day and there they were. Staring sadly at me, like viticultured puppies.

A small pile of slightly wizened purple grapes in a silver pot.
Sad.
So I put them in a pot! (Not recommended for sad puppies.)

A white hand, poised with a metal pastry cutter over wizened purple grapes in a small silver pot, sitting on a stove top with a number of cooked-on smears and spatters.
Never mind the unfortunate stove top. It's on the list of things to be scrubbed, I promise.
The recipe I found for grape jelly suggested using the back of a spoon or a potato masher to smush the grapes. I don't own a potato masher, and while the back of a spoon smacks of pioneer ingenuity, it turns out pioneer ingenuity is mostly just sweat. I opted for the pastry cutter, which worked a treat.

A white hand using a metal pastry cutter to crush purple grapes, revealing their fleshy pale-green interiors.
I'm always fascinated by fruit innards.
Smash smash smash, and turn the gas on to start breaking everybody down into their component bits.

A burbling mass of purple grapes and chopped, ruddy apple in a silver pot, with steam slightly obscuring the fruit.
Photoshop worked wonders on this photo. It was mostly steam when I took it.
I also chopped up an apple and tossed it in for the pectin...so far in my canning career, I haven't used pectin, so there wasn't any in my cabinets nor was I willing to go get some at 9 p.m. I make jelly impulsively when I should be going to bed because I'm an adult and you can do that sort of thing if you want to, when you're an adult.

A white cheesecloth sack, stained purple at the base and being pulled out of frame to the left. The base is resting in a clear pyrex beaker, which has a small amount of purple juice in it. Steam clouds the surface of the pyrex.
Pictured: me, contemplating how exactly to press the juice out of a bag of boiling-hot fruit guts.
I managed to pour the cooked fruit into a few layers of cheesecloth draped over a pyrex container, but then there was about twenty minutes of various silliness while I worked out ways to press the steaming bag of goo. "With my hands" was the first attempt, and that is Not Ideal. Back of a spoon against the side of the jar sort of worked, but I could tell there was a lot of juice I wasn't going to squish out that way. Finally I sandwiched the bag between two matched bowls and squeezed it, and that earned me exactly two cups of juice. And some singed fingers. The bowls were metal, which you may recall is a heat conductor. Oops.

Dark red-purple juice in a silver pot, with a thick wooden spoon sitting in the pot. A single white cat hair floats nearly centered on the surface.
Pretty pretty juice. Ignore the cat hair. It's just extra flavor.
I definitely overcooked the juice; the recipe said to stir in the sugar (which I cut down quite a bit, since I'm not canning this for posterity) and simmer for about ten minutes or until the liquid gelled. I zipped right past "gel" to "instantly solid and hermetically sealed to the frozen plate" and immediately pulled it off the heat. Added lemon juice, conveniently stashed in my fridge from the last time I had lemons, and scraped everything into a little ramekin to cool before going into the fridge.

A small white ramekin half-full of dark red jelly. A silver paring knife lifts a wedge of jelly, and the jelly shines bright garnet-red where the knife blade illuminates it.
Such a gorgeous garnet jelly.
It's kind of taffy-textured after refrigerating. I haven't tried it on a sandwich—I suspect it would tear the bread if I tried to spread it.

A photo from above of a round white plate with an arc of saltine crackers around the upper right rim, leading to an incomplete circle of yellow cheese squares surrounding a pool of red jelly on a turquoise-rimmed saucer, above which are green pimiento-stuffed olives and yellow and orange bell pepper slices, and directly at left a pile of carrot and rutabaga matchsticks.
Fancy cheese plate counts as dinner, right?
It's killer smeared on a cracker and topped with cheddar, though. I bet it would make great thumbprint cookies, too.

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