Thursday, October 29, 2009

Muscadine Madness

The day began calmly enough with me putting the icing on the cake to mail to my baby boy for his Halloween birthday. Richard had gone out in the pouring rain to harvest and wash the carrots. He had then grated them for me to complete as a carrot cake. I left a bit of a mess when I went to bed, but I had finished cleaning the kitchen as soon as I got up in the morning. I ran the dishwasher and put the icing bowl and beaters aside for Richard to lick after his breakfast.

Well, just when Richard may have thought it was safe to come back into the kitchen, I started making muscadine jam. The previous grape jam that our kitchen produced has gotten rave reviews; I think it’s because I include the fruit pulp in my preparation. I decided to do the same with the muscadines. The difference is that the concord and fox grapes render royal purple pulp; muscadine pulp is more mud colored.

Not to be deterred in this kitchen caper, I added a bit of yellow food coloring. Now the pulp looked like I scraped it out of a new baby’s diaper. This obviously wouldn’t do, so I added neon green – attempting to make the pulp glow like ripe green grapes. This was too whimpy to overcome the poopy hue. It was time to bring out the big guns.

I do appreciate precision; I’m simply incapable of the patience inherent in being precise. I should know better than to attempt correcting mistakes that take incremental tweaking to achieve the desired results. Oh, why didn’t I wait for Richard to wake?

Since I usually live by the dictum that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I really did it this time. Even though it seemed to me like I was exerting just a tiny bit of pressure on the little teardrop-shaped green food coloring bulb, I ended up with a pot of pulp the color of a Christmas tree. As we have already discussed, when the directions for jam making say, “Bring to a rolling boil,” they really mean to cook until your whole kitchen is covered in jots of jam. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in our kitchen festooned with green glop.

I’m well aware that “people eat first with their eyes,” so I may have trouble pawning this jam off as having been made with anything edible. This may be a great way to cut down on the number of Christmas packages we send. If all the food is weird-colored, people will prefer to be deleted from the list than to try getting past what their eyes tell them is in the jars. Should I color the Cajun-roasted pecans purple? And should the macaroons be maroon? Or, maybe if I name the jam “Muscadine Madness” folks will think I made it this lovely evergreen color on purpose.

It ought to give Mamie and Jack a good laugh at the latest of my city slicker stupidities.