Shiny Objects

All girls like shiny objects, and I suppose I'm not any different. In this case, stainless steel makes more of a general glare than a sparkle, but in the form of large kitchen appliances, it's shiny enough to qualify as an "oooh pretty" in my book. The new appliances look great and we christened the stove and fridge by making yet another batch of grape jelly. I haven't had the jelly yet, but the italian ices Brett made have been to die for!

This time we got the process right. In case anyone has any questions about grape jelly making, let me stop here and say:

1. You CANNOT make a double batch of jelly. Just because you have a pot big enough to hold it doesn't mean it is meant to happen. This also applies if you think you can make triple and quadruple batches because you have large pots from beer making like, say, we do. You can only make a single batch at a time or the jelly comes out as syrup because there's no "jell" to it.

2. Jar lids are destined to enter a parallel universe. Apparently they are somehow related to socks. You know how you just "knew" you put an even number of socks in the wash and still ended up with one short? Yeah. Same with jar lids. I mean, it's not complicated...you have X jars and X screw on rings and X lids. And somehow we ended up with X jars, X-1 rings, and X-2 lids. Where DO these things go and are they actually useful when they get there?

3. Given that "jell" was lacking, we started adding more pectin this time around. This is good. You can dip a spoon into ice water and then into the boiling mixture and then back in the icewater to see how much it jells and get a feel for when you've added "enough". You really can't add too much pectin. Some of our jars of jelly can actually stand up, salute the flag, and vote Republican. They're jelling more than those Dr. Scholl's inserts. And that's just fine by me!

Now, with lessons learned, we continued on with our jelly making on our new stove...even having a quick scare when one pot boiled over with no notice and we had grape syrup boiling on the stove top. Luckily we had lots of Ceramibryte and no permenant etching or discoloration of the cooktop resulted.

And here's what you've all been waiting for...the pictures!