I'm no Susie homemaker

And here is the proof. Apart from the packet mix satay I made when i was 14, this is possibly, no sorry, without a doubt THE worst thing I have ever made. The catastrophe began unassumingly at 3 pm, where upon I washed hulled and chopped 1.5kgs of strawberries fresh from the farmers market. "Here I am," I thought, "making jam".

"Wow look at me making jam".

I left the strawberries to macerate I think is the correct term for 2 hours. Where upon I put them into the slow cooker and thought I turned it onto high.
"There," I thought, "strawberry jam by bedtime, toast and fresh strawberry jam for breakfast, what a nice way to ease back into term."

At 10.30 when I felt that the jam should indeed be Jammy enough to be received by my freshly sterilized jars, I checked and realized I had not been cooking the jam but merely gently warming it for 4 hours.

It was 11 pm, I was past the point of no return. I put the slow cooker on High and went to bed, somewhat mistakenly- I now see, assuming that 6 hours in a slow cooker there would still be something that resembled a strawberry to put into a jar.

Pretty much every hour I was awoken by the sickly sweet smell of strawberries cooking or the rattle of the glass lid on the slow cooker, but I thought at 6 there will be lovely jam. So I soldiered on.

At 5.30am when Elliot woke us up I had had only 2 hours sleep, and half an hour to go before I had to get up to go to work. Something was not right. The sickly sweet strawberry smell had changed, to a burnt sugar, charcoal smell.

I got up

I had burnt the jam to a charred sticky paste. Yet at that time I didn't think " this is inedible, I will throw the whole lot out", no I persisted and now have 5 jars of black burnt strawberry jam in the fridge. It has set so hard that I don't even know if I will be able to get it out of the jars to use them again.or if the burntness of the jam has so infused itself into the glass that anything else put in there will have that smokey carbon after taste, Or if I should just call it a day and chuck out the whole lot and say to the world and Maggie beer. i Am no jam maker.









Scones anyone?