Strawberry Island

Pursuant to going U-pick strawberry picking this week, an adventure I got to chronicle in The Buffalo News, I made strawberry jam.

Unbelievable, the feeling of accomplishment! And of having the right garage sale equipment. I have garage sale tongs for the jars and a garage sale funnel to use to pour the jam into the jars, and just recently I acquired a special mini-canner that is good for jars that are pint-sized and smaller. That is it sitting on the Bosch up above.

Strawberry jam!

 

All this while Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts were touring the Darwin Martin House right down the street. I take time out of my life and my kitchen only for Leonard Pennario so I did not join them.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, I now have six half-pints of jam. The satisfaction (speaking of the Rolling Stones) is unbelievable!

I used this Martha Stewart recipe, just strawberries and sugar, beautiful and simple. It took a while to find just a basic recipe. A lot of online recipes had too low an amount of sugar. "I wanted to be healthy," people write. Fie! The science of canning is such that you need a certain amount -- a large amount -- of sugar to preserve the jam right and get the right texture.

And as long as you are not piously going to eat your strawberries plain, let us not be naive, jam is the least of the evils. It is one of the few things in my life that illustrate the principle of everything in moderation. You have a spoonful on your toast, big deal.

Not like that ice cream I made with the strawberries that did not go into the jam.

Strawberries!

My downfall!

Make mine mulberry

Remember the mystery mulberry tree?

It has led to mulberry jam!

The jam did not appear mysteriously overnight as the tree did. But it is supernatural in its deliciousness.

I have made a lot of jam, starting with marmalade. Like the mulberry tree, this marmalade did appear overnight, maybe not mysteriously but overnight all the same. It was before I was married. I kept all hours and I was up at 1 a.m., sterilizing jars, worrying about whether this stuff would gel. It did. I was born under happy jam stars!

But this mulberry jam.

I said to Howard, I think this is the best jam I ever made.

It is exquisite!

And irresistible. I find myself eating it on stale bread, even. Anything. I could eat cardboard with this stuff on it. While I am working on my book it intrudes on my thoughts. One minute it is all about Leonard Pennario and the next ... what about that mulberry jam?

I had never tried a mulberry before but they are kind of like mini blackberries. They have these tiny seeds the way raspberries and blackberries do. It is no wonder that Van Gogh and medieval artists, such as whoever painted that picture up above, immortalized the mulberry bush.

Also what I have found, while it is fun to munch on mulberries as a snack, it is better to save them for jam. They are better as jam. It is not even just the taste, this dark sweetness. It is the texture.  Just like in raspberry jam, you get this tiny touch of crunch. Ahhhh.

I did not even bother canning any of this stuff. Why bother?

We are going to eat it so fast!