getting to that 'point'...

It's pretty funny the things we can find to do in order to avoid an onerous task. In addition to the usual foot dragging, I washed a load of clothing, talked to the cat, swept the floor, rooted around in the pantry, wrote/responded to lots of emails, wrote several postcards.Then finally, when it got down to 'fish or cut bait', and there was nothing else I could think of to avoid the inevitable:  made the strawberry jam.

Whereupon I have made a couple of interesting discoveries. Trivial, but worth noting for future ref. That plastic clamshell/box that is supposed to weigh a pound filled with strawberries, will, when you cut off the caps, mash them up, and measure, make just over one cup. If the recipe calls for six cups, you had better plan on getting six boxes. Which I did not. But had some pureed berries in the freezer I'd put in the blender, then poured in muffin tin to freeze a couple of weeks ago. So even though the instructions say to use a potato masher to moosh them up, so there are chunks instead of putting them in a food processor, I added some of the stuff from the freezer to make the full six cups. The recipe indicates that if you use the recommended amounts of berries and (huge, horrifying quantity of white, refined, granulated) sugar, you should get eight cups of jam.

Then there is the info. gleaned from the instructions that came in the box of sure-jel: if you are using whole fruit,, mooshed up so there are little bits and pieces, the end product is jam. If you are using juice -either bought in a bottle at the farm/store, or strained (with too much effort involved) from whole fruit, the stuff you will be spreading on your toast and biscuits is going to be pretty much transparent, and is jelly.

Another bit of trivia you would want to know if you ever took complete leave of your senses and thought it would be a good idea to make jam - is that it is going to be very helpful to have another set of hands on hand. To help with the dipping and stirring and especially another mouth to stand by and offer moral support when you get anxious about 'am I doing this right?' and stressed over mixing things together (another point of no return) and if you've let it bubble long enough, etc., etc....There is one little jar that when I turned them up-side-down to encourage them to seal properly, where I saw a clump of sugar, on the bottom in the jar, that would not be there if there had been just one more hand available, stirring it in the berry concoction while I was pouring.

I optimistically washed ten little half-pint jars from the box of a dozen I bought at Wally world last week. And had them all ready to put the jam in when I'd measured, stirred, cooked, bubbled, timed, misc. hand-wringing, major anxiety, and found that it did actually fill up all ten.  I am pretty sure I could have bought ten quarts - not halfpints, or even pints- of strawberry jam, for what I have invested in this project. To say nothing of the stress I put myself through getting it done...