A few weeks ago we had a crop of concord grapes falling from the vines behind our house. The kids were eating them by the bellyful, seeds and all. (Bellyful: adj. term of measurement equal to or greater than what an average elephant can consume)

My head filled with fears of grape vines growing in their bellies or worse: the next diaper change. I decided to take matters into my own hands and make some grape jelly with the kids. I picked a day off from work and rolled up our sleeves (or by some act of parenting wisdom, I dressed the kids in short sleeves). We picked, we ate, picked, threw them at each other, slipped on them and made a general mess.

At some point we filled a big pot.

Then we had to take them off the stems.

For some reason the kids were less interested in this part of the process, but that is what I get for paying so little for my labor costs. From there, the boiling of the grapes- then the churning, swishing, squeezing of the grapes. Interest peaked again at this point.

But not when I explained squished grapes outside were one thing- Grapes on floor and carpet a different one altogether.
In all, the whole process took almost half a day. The hardest part was telling the kids they would have to wait until the jelly set for a day before we could eat it. That’s not true. The hardest part was the whole caning sterilizing process. For some reason, I figured, how hard can it be to process all these cans in a boiling thing of water without racks? Turns out not as easy as I thought.
It also turns out I should read instructions. My husband tells me this sometimes- he may be on to something (just don’t tell him I said so). Apparently, just because I thought the jelly mixture was sweet enough with the 4 cups of sugar instead of the 7 the recipe requested, it was not the right sugar/gel ratio. Who knew chemistry would be so important in cooking…
Needless to say, I got to do the whole thing again.
Now we have some gifts to start handing out. Unless the kids eat it all first.

Tags: concord grape jelly, cooking with kids, providence

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under cooking, food, Life, parenting, the kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.