Posted by Loulou on Sep 1, 2014 | 2 comments

HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT!! Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…

Oh, boy, it’s jelly time around here and mama is stomping around the kitchen wondering why her hot pepper jelly did not JELL this time!

This happens every now and then, but mama says it’s usually when the day is humid or she has been a bit too abstemious (love that word) with the sugar.  Always a bad move, mama says. And I say, “What do you think pepper jelly is, mama, a diet food?”  Haha….she didn’t laugh a lot, but she’s not in the mood to giggle when the jelly’s off…

So there she was, scooping out all the jelly from a dozen glass jars to put it BACK into the big pot with MORE sugar and another packet of pectin and some lemon juice, just to be sure, and it all boiled up into a nice sunset color turning to deep red when it was ready.

Mama whizzes her sweet red peppers and one little hot red one in the food processor with a cup and a half of vinegar, a small onion and a little salt, and half a cup of lemon juice, and then she presses out all the juice from the pulp into a BIG pot and then the fun begins.  I think she had six long, sweet red peppers and one little yellow one, but you can use red bell peppers, too, as long as they are very, very ripe and dark red, which is why mama makes jelly at the end of summer.

It looks to me like about two cups of pepper liquid in that pot.  Then you add five cups of sugar and let it rip.  The jelly will boil up the sides of the pot, which is why you use a BIG one because if there is one thing you never want splashing on your skin, it’s hot jelly!  I stand way across the room when this is going on, but I can still smell it and it’s wonderful!

So mama boils the jelly for 10 minutes and then stirs in a packet of pectin and boils it again for another couple of minutes and then tests it with a big spoon, dipping the spoon into the jelly and then watching it roll off the spoon in strands.  When the strands are fairly thick and run together into ONE strand, then the jelly is ready for the jars.  Mama’s mama did this all the time and it works really well, but mama thinks that this time, the peppers were simply not pectin-y enough and she thinks she should have used bells, not the long ones.

Of course, there is always the alternative, I said to mama, that when you cook those ribs (I am salivating as I write) or those lamb chops or roast that turkey in November, you can always just POUR that unsuccessful jelly into a nice serving dish and use it as a sauce, right?

See, I’m full of ideas in the kitchen but sometimes mama says to me, “Loulou, there are too many cooks and not enough sous chefs in this kitchen!”

Or sometimes she says, “Loulou, go take a nap–there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians in this kitchen.” Okay, okay, I get the hint….

“But wait,” I say, “what if you…”

“LOULOU–go take a nap, okay!  Can’t you see I’m on a jelly roll here?”

And so I do….

I like to put my feet up after a hard day’s advice to mama in the kitchen…

SUCCESS! Must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that…la la la