As a married, but alone twenty-something, I'm spending my Saturday evening canning jam and trying to can peaches. This was a skill I have been wanting to master for awhile now, and Bryce's deployment and the bounty of fruits in the Northwest seemed like fate telling me to "Go For It!" Ironically enough, I don't eat jam (or jelly) on anything...ever. But that's a story for another time.
Turns out, homemade jam is a hit with my family. More likely, free food is a hit, but I'll take whatever self-esteem boosters I can get. :) Which leads me to today, when I scrambled around at the Farmers' Market to to find end-of-season blackberries (outrageously overpriced, might I add), raspberries, and peaches.
Back to the lesson at hand, I have mashed my raspberries and am cooking them on the stove, preparing to add my gigantic, overflowing (8.5 cups!) bowl of sugar to the mix. I pick the overflowing bowl up, begin to pour, and *whoosh* flames are coming up from the stove top. I panic, because really, what else do you do when something catches fire four inches in front of you and you are left holding a heavy pot of boiling fruit? Well, you may react calmly, but I panic. My Dad comes in, saves the day, I spill boiling fruit on my foot and come away with a valuable, and previously unknown fact: Sugar, yes-plain old granulated sugar, catches on fire when poured on a hot stove top. Having cooked and baked for a good number of years, along with even taking a cooking class in high school, you would think that I would have discovered this before now, but nope.
For the record, the jam does not seem to have suffered any lasting damages from its trauma and is happily sitting in jars on my counter. :)
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