I made jam! Well, jelly really. Pomegranate-Jalapeno Jelly. When my friend, Kiley, proposed the project, just before Desmond’s first birthday party, I might add, I thought “Heck yeah,” figuring it would be like homemade pasta or chocolate truffles- things that seem insurmountably hard, but are actually fun and easy. I was wrong. Actually, it was insurmountably hard.
Now given...we cavalierly began this undertaking in the company of two needy toddlers clinging to our ankles and 40 pomegranates waiting to be juiced. I thought Kiley’s magical juicer would do all the work, while Kiley marveled at all of the tiny seeds that make up one pomegranate. It turned out to be an extraordinary amount of work. After several hours, we had managed to extract the 3 1/2 cups of juice from the pomegranates, coat every surface of my kitchen in a brilliant pink splatter, simmer the juice with two halved and de-seeded jalapenos, and keep two toddlers from going completely nuts through various forms of trickery.
And then we quit, throwing the spicy juice in a freezer bag to be dealt with later. Well that later came this past weekend because apparently Thanksgiving didn’t afford us with enough opportunities to spend days on end in the kitchen, and my dear friend is moving in three weeks, with a baby, just before Christmas, while ending a very demanding job, so this is just what she needs right now...canning.
But all that aside, the second round wasn’t nearly as bad. After our misplaced over-confidence with the first bout, we did extensive research and preparation for the second bit. After all, this was the scary part, this was the part shrouded in precise measurements and obscure tools, science and botulism.
I visited my local library as well as the Cook’s Library on Third Street. I scoured the Internet and the back of the pectin box, and put together enough information so that I now felt only moderately quaky about the whole enterprise.
I washed and heated the jars and lids in the dishwasher (as per the directions of the experienced canner that Kiley talked to), figured out how to work the rack in the bottom of the giant old kettle that belongs to Kiley’s grandma, and defrosted the juice. Kiley came over at 10:00 AM. Desmond was still down for his morning nap, and Roxie was busy playing with her papa.
The juice was bubbling away. The jars were hot and ready. We added the pectin to the hot pomegranate-jalapeno mixture and let it return to the boil before pouring in 5 cups of sugar. Kiley stirred that pot until the sugar dissolved. We let the whole thing alone for a minute before ladling the hot syrupy mixture into the waiting jars, wiped the tops, screwed on lids, and put the jars in the canner.
Once the water in the canner returned to a boil, the whole thing bubbled away for 10 minutes, and then just sat for five after we turned off the stove and removed the lid. We took the jars out of the canner and set them on a dishtowel on the counter. The lids started making little tiny popping sounds (that’s good, right?) as we nervously watched the drama of pink jelly sitting in a jar. Nothing more happened. We gingerly tucked them in for the night under the protection of another dish towel and quietly backed out of the kitchen to leave the jars undisturbed for the next 24 hours.
The next night I checked the seals on all of those pretty little jars. They all seemed safe and snug to my inexpert eye, and I opened up the one that held the leftovers, the not quite full jar that we had refrigerated the night before. In classic pepper jelly fashion, I, of course, spooned some over cream cheese and served it with crackers before dinner.
The jelly was sweet and a little spicy, redolent of both jalapenos and pomegranate, like the unexpected combination of flavors that you find at Scoops that help you taste both peanut butter and coconut in a new way. I think Kiley might secretly be a jelly-making genius.
So now I’m busy coming up with deserving ways to use this brilliant little condiment, but in the meantime I think that I’ll store those jars in the fridge, you know, just in case.
