KITCHEN MISADVENTURES: CAUGHT IN A CELLULOID JAM. I always felt bad for Meg, in Little Women, when her jelly wouldn’t jell. So is it appropriate, or ironic, that I have now become the Anti-Meg?

I attempted to make strawberry jam, based on a Food & Wine recipe. The idea was that this recipe, for “icebox strawberry jam,” didn’t require anything crazy like sterilized jars or ice baths or what have you, and it would keep in the fridge for about two weeks. The recipe in the cookbook is as follows:

ingredients: one pint thickly sliced strawberries; 1/4 cup honey; 1/4 tsp finely grated lemon zest; small pinch five-spice powder; salt & pepper

how-to: Put everything in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Simmer over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 40 mins. Let cool, then refrigerate until chilled.

What happened: OK, so I estimated on the honey, because I don’t have a measuring cup. I used between 1/2 and 1/3 of a small honeybear. (…Shut up, I think they’re cute.) I also used the juice of a lemon, rather than the lemon zest, because I’m easily bored. Other than that, I basically followed the recipe.

And I got this… stuff. It’s kind of awesome in its own special way. It doesn’t spread so well, and I think the honey vs. strawberry flavors don’t blend as well as they should. But it doesn’t taste bad at all, and if I can come up with good recipes that won’t require spreadability (scrambled eggs + strawberry jam?), I think it’ll be yummy. Still… what I actually have in my fridge right now is not so much strawberry jam as strawberry sludge.

How come? People can definitely correct me if they think it didn’t work out because of the amount of honey or the lemon juice vs. lemon zest issue. But I think it’s because I overcooked. There was a definite point when the mixture turned from “some strawberries in some honey” to “jam impending, ten o’clock!”, and I think I wasn’t attentive enough to that shift. Basically, the mixture darkened and became the color I associate with strawberry jam, rather than the color I associate with fresh strawberries, and that’s probably when I should have cut off the stove. Instead I kept cooking for the entire time stated in the recipe. I suspect five to ten fewer minutes on the stovetop would have produced jam that would spread like an inappropriate simile. Unfortunately, you really do have to chop up a lot of strawberries for not a lot of jam, so I’m not sure when I’ll be trying this recipe again.

Bonus misadventure!: I forgot that “on sale” does not = “cheap.” Hence my lunch today: bread topped with thickly-sliced heirloom tomato, thickly-sliced fresh mozzarella, and leaves of fresh Thai basil, all toasted in the toaster oven on a foiled tray. Gotta say, I had expected a heirloom tomato to taste super awesome, and this one, at least, pretty much tasted like any other tomato. (I munched a bit of it raw, and cooked half of it with pasta, too, so I’ve tried it several ways.) The open-faced sandwich was good! –but probably not good enough to justify the fact that I was basically eating money.