Friday, September 26, 2008

'Can' Do (oh please)


Okay, the filled jars of marmalade (all four tiny eight ounce jars) are sitting submerged in the titanic pan waiting for the water to reach a "rolling boil" so they can be boiled for ten minutes. Will it take half an hour for the water to boil so I can boil the jars for ten minutes?

Recipes always take longer for me than they do in the cookbook. What I mean is if the cookbook says "fry onions till golden, about ten minutes" it always takes me about twenty minutes. Is it me? Does the author have a much more powerful stove than I do? Do they assume all their readers are yuppies who have professional stoves in their home kitchens? It's probably me.

It took me four or five hours to make that marmalade. I really just looked at the hour and not the minutes when I checked my watch at the beginning. It was eleven-something o'clock. So each eight ounce jar of marmalade represents an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes of my time. I should sell that stuff for big bucks! Except I think I might have made pear ginger marmalade flavored cement. It was hard to tell if that was jam "flaking" off the spoon or a chunk of pear so I just kept cooking.

It tastes good. Fay and I enjoyed licking the spoons. I also discovered that Fay likes to eat lime rind. What a weirdo.

Forty-five minutes later, here are the little suckers in person:



However the marmalade comes out I still feel pretty satisfied with myself right now.

2 comments:

Jenn said...

They look delicious. When is mine getting here?

What's the pink jar after the "candy" jar say?

Anonymous said...

It really sucks that you have to get a migraine when you are making delicious food.... that is just plain rotten luck.

I hope it is gone... I can't believe you can cook and read and type on a keyboard when you have a migraine. You must have some kind of tolerance for pain!

Thinking of you on this beautifully foggy day!