How to Waste $12 and Five Hours

It started as a brilliant idea and potentially a second installation in the Fridge Door Project. It ended with over five pints of tomato jam that I don't really love. Five pints. Five jars mocking me from the kitchen counter every time I walk by. Sigh.

I was trying to decide what my next Fridge Door Project endeavor would be when I found a $5 basket of tomatoes at Fruit Bowl. If you don't know St. Thomas, Fruit Bowl is a magical place a store on island that has all the good stuff (fruit, vegetables, grains, beans, free-range chickens, etc.) without most of the bad stuff (cheetos, oreo cookies, fruit loops, etc.). It does have some processed foods, but on the whole it weighs far heavier on the good than the bad. All that plus the prices are about the same, and for some items cheaper, than the regular grocery stores. And it has these great $5 baskets of almost-past-its-prime produce. When the baskets are full of bruised apples or bananas I usually pass them up. We're just not super into applesauce or banana smoothies on a regular basis. When the baskets are full of 5-6 lbs of tomatoes or red peppers or eggplant, I snatch one up. (And I may or may not cackle happily to myself throughout the rest of my shopping, viewing my tomatoes kind of like that witch viewed those unsuspecting kids that stumbled into her gingerbread house. They don't realize they're about to be cooked up into something nice. I promise to call my psychologist friend as soon as this post is up.) So, a basket of tomatoes. That's the situation I found myself in this weekend.

There it is. Six pounds of tomatoes. After discovering an albino roach living in my kitchen scale, I used the bathroom scale to weigh them. The kitchen scale has been cast out of our family forever for harboring such an abominable creature. I don't mess around. (Our dog has considered himself warned.)

Last month I traveled up to Atlanta with a friend to help her out with something. (Something fun. More details on that hopefully next month.) The hotel restaurant both nights served adorable little mini-biscuits with tomato jam. It was insanely good. My thinking was why not try to turn these tomatoes into a tomato jam that I could use on hamburgers/veggie burgers in place of ketchup. I had all the ingredients on hand (for a recipe I've never tried before) including the 3 1/2 cups of sugar. It always amazes me how much sugar goes into jam. We don't use much sugar at all so we've made the decision to buy fair trade. It's about $7 for a small bag but we make it last forever. Except, apparently, when I'm making jam and basically the entire bag is called for. But I digress. Back to making the jam. So I cored the tomatoes and began to chop...

And I chopped...

And I chopped...

And I chopped...

For about an hour I chopped. Seth offered to come in and help but we only have one cutting board so I had to decline. (Note to self: buy another cutting board.) Then I threw all the ingredients into a pot and left it to boil for the required 1 1/2 hours. Not even close to jam consistency. Hmm... So I left it for another 30 minutes. Still liquid. A grand total of 3 hours later I finally dragged out my canning pot and the jars. After bringing a million gallons of water to a boil and putting the jars and lids in the sterilize them I was ready to start canning. I wasn't thrilled with the final taste or texture of the jam, but I was far too tired to care. I had started the whole shebang around 5:30pm and it was now almost 10pm. That's a lot of time spent on tomatoes. So I ladled the jam into the jars one by one and let them process in the boiling water bath for 20 minutes.

And now those five jars are sitting on my counter mocking me. I haven't put them away because I derive some sick satisfaction from giving the jam the evil eye every time I walk into the room. Whatever. It tastes fines. Some people might even love it. It's spicy and rich and has a little kick to it. But it wasn't what I was hoping for. Lesson learned. Make one jar first and see if I like it. I'll remember that on my next foray into tomato jam. But first Seth and I have five pints to eat.