Life is Not a Bowl of Cherries
Jul. 8th, 2019 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zesty_pintoOh my god, I am not supposed to be this overworked for an easy wedding gift.
I spent 30 bucks and an hour picking cherries (in beautiful weather) in some gigantic grove just so I could get home and make enough cherry jam for each table that we're catering to.
Do you know why cherry jam is so uncommon? It's because it's goddamn time consuming for really diminished returns.
We picked 6 pints of sour cherries. Then I spent hours pitting these things and plunking the pits into a pot held by my thighs as I dropped the juicy pulp into a larger pot.
At one point I dropped the pot into the large pot and wasted several minutes picking the pits out of my hard efforts.
Despite this, despite my attempts to find any rogue uncored cherries that got in, despite the madness setting in as I ran eternally sticky fingers back and forth to look for a pale intruder in my bowl of edible joy, despite how I watched the sun go from an eternal vigil to a dusky night: despite all of this, I STILL got a pit during rendering! God damn it!
Then I rendered the slurry, thinking maybe I should try a jelly. Nope, cherries are 60% pulp and cheesecloth did nothing, so no chance making this work. Ugh.
Okay, the slurry went into the pot and I slowly stirred, and stirred, and then stirred, until I was wondering what mad lad could have offered this as a punishment to children because I was bored out of my senses as I kept trying to ratio in sugar that kept staining red because of the blood of a thousand cherries on my hands, followed by the pouring of pectin that was 4 years past its best date so needed extra pectin to compensate for it because the pulp was eternally runny.
Michelle during an initial tasting said it reminded her of apples and I was ready to agree with her but it depressed me to think about it so I said nothing and kept stirring the pot.
Then the jars I was going to use were too big because apparently 6 overfilled pints of cherries with tiny pits yields way too few preserves!
I thought I'd get maybe 12 jars.
Nope! I got 8. And out of smaller jars.
(8 cups jam) / (6 pints cherries) = 1 1/3 cups per pint. I got 2/3s of nothing!
The worst part is cherries are not cheap when you pick them yourself. It's like 4 bucks a pint!
With the jars, it means we're spending 5 bucks per cup of finished product.
5 bucks for several hours of effort! Even at a bulk like I did it, it's really not worth it.
The only silver lining is that I rendered the jam into a smooth product and the cherries have a brilliant red akin to the wax you'd see on a baby bell cheese wheel, so it's very pretty and will look nice when we decorate the wedding tables with them.
The worst part of this though is that I still need cherries. God damn it, it's going to be another 2 and a half pints.
Later on, I'm going to work on raspberries if I'm not breaking the bank after all of this. I did want to make a knotweed spread, but I wasn't prepared to do anything like that yet. I need pectin either way, I am completely out.
I'll have a real post up later on, life's been busy. I'll catch up on posts too, promise!
I spent 30 bucks and an hour picking cherries (in beautiful weather) in some gigantic grove just so I could get home and make enough cherry jam for each table that we're catering to.
Do you know why cherry jam is so uncommon? It's because it's goddamn time consuming for really diminished returns.
We picked 6 pints of sour cherries. Then I spent hours pitting these things and plunking the pits into a pot held by my thighs as I dropped the juicy pulp into a larger pot.
At one point I dropped the pot into the large pot and wasted several minutes picking the pits out of my hard efforts.
Despite this, despite my attempts to find any rogue uncored cherries that got in, despite the madness setting in as I ran eternally sticky fingers back and forth to look for a pale intruder in my bowl of edible joy, despite how I watched the sun go from an eternal vigil to a dusky night: despite all of this, I STILL got a pit during rendering! God damn it!
Then I rendered the slurry, thinking maybe I should try a jelly. Nope, cherries are 60% pulp and cheesecloth did nothing, so no chance making this work. Ugh.
Okay, the slurry went into the pot and I slowly stirred, and stirred, and then stirred, until I was wondering what mad lad could have offered this as a punishment to children because I was bored out of my senses as I kept trying to ratio in sugar that kept staining red because of the blood of a thousand cherries on my hands, followed by the pouring of pectin that was 4 years past its best date so needed extra pectin to compensate for it because the pulp was eternally runny.
Michelle during an initial tasting said it reminded her of apples and I was ready to agree with her but it depressed me to think about it so I said nothing and kept stirring the pot.
Then the jars I was going to use were too big because apparently 6 overfilled pints of cherries with tiny pits yields way too few preserves!
I thought I'd get maybe 12 jars.
Nope! I got 8. And out of smaller jars.
(8 cups jam) / (6 pints cherries) = 1 1/3 cups per pint. I got 2/3s of nothing!
The worst part is cherries are not cheap when you pick them yourself. It's like 4 bucks a pint!
With the jars, it means we're spending 5 bucks per cup of finished product.
5 bucks for several hours of effort! Even at a bulk like I did it, it's really not worth it.
The only silver lining is that I rendered the jam into a smooth product and the cherries have a brilliant red akin to the wax you'd see on a baby bell cheese wheel, so it's very pretty and will look nice when we decorate the wedding tables with them.
The worst part of this though is that I still need cherries. God damn it, it's going to be another 2 and a half pints.
Later on, I'm going to work on raspberries if I'm not breaking the bank after all of this. I did want to make a knotweed spread, but I wasn't prepared to do anything like that yet. I need pectin either way, I am completely out.
I'll have a real post up later on, life's been busy. I'll catch up on posts too, promise!
no subject
Date: 2019-07-09 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 03:15 pm (UTC)I realized it's starting to lose its color because of the heat and sunlight, so I just hid them away. Ugh, so annoying!
no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-09 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 03:16 pm (UTC)Okay, could be better in a lot of ways, though, too.