Cheery Cherry Jam

Last night I made cherry, for lack of a better phrase, jam. I could use "preserves" but that sounds so Martha Stewart, or maybe cherry incarcerations might work best for Martha. Or how about Martha's Jail House Cherry Conserves. Interestingly Preservative in Spain (and France) means rubber and I don't mean galoshes. Oddly conserve too might apply to this as in "no thanks I am conserving myself". Anyway it's cherry time in here in Catalunya so I got 3 lbs for 2 euros. OK I didn't go to the beautiful mercado right up the street I was at the dumpy low rent Supermarket buying a box of roach hotels and there next to the cashier, the batteries and the preservatives were 2 kilo boxes of cherries. My favorite cherries come from a nearby region called Llieda. These came from there so I broke my rule about not buying stuff like this in dumpy supermarkets and well... bought them.

As always when I make jam it came out runny. I know the rule is an equal amount (in weight) of stuff to sugar. Whether it be gooseberries or stove bolts it's 50/50. In the health concious 80s using this much sugar seemed like shooting up in front of your grandma or having sex with a ferret at the downtown library, so everybody had runny jam or added way too much waxy pectin or made that weird stuff called freezer jam, which for all intents and purposes is a popsicle. But the truth be the truth if you want it to set it's 50/50 or nuttin'.

OK so I get this nice recipe for chunky strawberry jam from the BBC's website. It's from some swank gastro-pub in Upper Bottom Lick sur Mer or someplace. Cozy feel, nice picture of the stuff being held by 2 happy lesbians who have left there jobs working as editors at Penguin and invested their respective divorce settlements into this charming country inn located unbeknownst to them within spitting distance from a Nuclear power plant and The Royal Harrier Crash Jet Crash Facility.

The recipe said 3 stone 7 of luscious perfectly ripe english strawberries. So I got a few rocks and kinda guessed the same amount of cherries... no I am lying. It said 2 kilos of strawberries stemmed and cut in half. Personally I always leave the stems in, I love that christmasy feel that inedible green leaves adds to my strawberry jam... And 1.67 kilos of sugar. OK and the zest and juice of 1 lemon. Could the international food tribunal please come up with another word for zest? How about peel for example. OK I'm using Spanish cherries and not English strawberries but I figure we are in the same ballpark. 1.67 kilos? where did they get that number, from the local Wicken council?

Note: In Europa they only measure by volume when it comes to liquids or deducing the size of an apartment. No they go by weight which is good and much more accurate but requires a scale. So off I go to the tienda de Electricos Domesticos. Oddly it's inside the beautiful mercado where I didn't buy the cherries. I had to sneak past my fruit lady Angela on the way to buy the scale because I knew it would be all over the mercado that I bought the cherries at the dumpy supermarket and not from her. The result of this indiscretion would be 6 months os peaches like baseballs and rubber carrots. So the tienda de Electricos Domesticos has a few scales. OK let this known, this is the truth, European domestic kitchen equipment sucks. It's true! It's all plastic and looks like a fashion accessory for a french house wife who smokes long skinny cigarettes, takes classes in furniture restoration and waits for her next bikini wax while Jean Claude slaves away running spreadsheets in the acquisitions department of a multi national company that makes the batteries for a guidance system for handheld cluster bombs.

Oh darn!!! The coffee... Gotta go, mas tarde!!!