Word of the Day

ESPRESSIVO - Used to indicate permission to take a coffee break.

HTP and I picked strawberries yesterday. It's kind of hard to figure out exactly how many strawberries you actually will need. I'm talking about jam-making. I know how many strawberries that I need if I'm going to make strawberry shortcake. The thing is, when someone tells you that you need six pints of strawberries to make one batch of jam, and you want to make four batches of jam (this sounds so much like the stupid word equations that I used to hate from math class), you should be able to figure out that you need 24 pints of strawberries. OK, and then the recipe says that you need six cups of crushed strawberries for one recipe. So, doing the math, I figured out that six pints of strawberries crush down to six cups of strawberries. Brilliant. So I figured out that I needed to pick twelve quarts of strawberries. Right? And to be absolutely safe, I found out that 1 dry quart of berries is equal to one and a half pounds. So...in the end, I needed 18 pounds of strawberries.

Then...

When you get out to the "You Pick 'Em" strawberry fields they hand you a bucket. The bucket is the size of one of those ice cream buckets that you can buy in the store with the handle on it. You have to have a lot of room in your freezer to buy ice cream in that kind of quantity. Or...you're having a party...but that's beside the point. The point is that I don't know how many quarts of berries each of these buckets hold. I don't know how many pounds these buckets hold. HTP and I looked at each other and decided that each bucket looked like it would carry 3 quarts of berries. Guesstimate. We picked four buckets of berries, thinking that we'd end up with 12 quarts of berries.

We were wrong. I made four batches of jam last night and I only used half of the berries that we picked. I'm out of pectin. I need more pectin. I started a batch of strawberry schnapps and I still have more than one bucket full of strawberries left. In the fridge. #1 son promised to bring me more pectin when he comes home from work tonight. I figure that I have enough berries to make two more batches of jam AND enough leftover for strawberry shortcake and strawberry sundaes. I am now writing myself a reminder for next year. One full bucket of strawberries is enough for two batches of jam. Or one bucket of strawberries actually carries six quarts of strawberries (uncrushed). Well...at least I've got enough sugarfree strawberry jam to last a bit.

Oh...and I lost a battle in what looks like it's going to be and extended war with the raccoons last night. I got so involved with making jam last night that I didn't remember to bring the bird-feeders inside until 9:30 PM...after dark. I might as well have left the feeder that they'd cleaned out but it was the principle of the whole thing. I'll have to be a bit quicker in bringing the feeders inside from now on. They must have been waiting to strike the second that sun went down.

Murphyism of the Day

Fox on Problematics

When a problem goes away, the people working to solve it do not.