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A few years ago two friends asked me if they could watch me make jelly and I have been jinxed ever since. I know they didn’t do it but somehow it has happened because for the two years following those lessons, I have either spilled, burned, undercooked or messed up the recipe that I have been using for 40 years, at least on the first batch.

That is what happens when you think you know more than you actually do. A little humility here would go a long way. I will say that it wasn’t because I had bragged about my jelly making abilities but that I mentioned I make jelly every year. It’s not rocket science, or I didn’t think it was until (for the third year in a row) I made mustang grape syrup or mustang grape glue. I know 8 year old kids who can make a decent batch of jelly, even boys and men can do it but I am not having a good run with the jelly.

There is nothing more humbling than making a mess of something you’ve done for 40 or 50 years and then telling everyone about it. I am just curious enough to want to know if other people suddenly have failures with things they have done by rote like I have and have it fail. You know, maybe my failures are because I have made hundreds of jars of jelly that depending on my aging mind is not a good idea. You know how a recipe is supposed to go but somehow the order of things going into the recipe gets out of order and you have a mess. As a matter of fact ‘the order of things’ in this recipe is the culprit or that is what keeps popping up. You put the juice in the pot THEN the PECTIN, stir it in well and let it come to a rolling boil and THEN and ONLY then do you add the 7 cups of sugar! Well, I put the pectin in after boiling the juice and dumping in the sugar. Apparently this was big wrong.

From that minute on there was no way to ‘re-do’ this grape syrup but that didn’t keep me from trying. I had my husband read ‘how to fix jelly that won’t set’ to me two times and yet I had my own ideas about how to do that because I thought their way had too many steps. Big mistake. So I dumped all the semi set jelly back into the pot, mixed up more pectin with a bit of water, (my idea) and dumped it in with the once again bubbling juice and to my surprise the juice rose up to the top of the vessel and I was so happy. You see it never did that the first time I cooked it and I knew that was bad news and so seeing it rise, I thought halleluiah, I have resurrected the mess.

Next I poured it into jars and was busy patting myself on the back and even put one jar in the fridge to hurry along the jelling process (again my idea) and the next morning I took out what I thought was the re-done jelly and opened it and voila, it was jelled! I spread some on my biscuit and was reveling in how clever I had been when I realized this was not the jar I had put in the fridge but another one from last year.

Drat…I opened the other one and tried to stick the spoon into it and it wouldn’t go and I stuck the knife in and it got stuck and Pat had to pull it out. Well, I was inconsolable but Pat wanted to talk about how much sugar, grapes and pectin I had wasted and still had no jelly and I didn’t want to hear it. It was not a good way to start the day. Anybody want 8 jars or grape syrup, or at least it will be grape syrup if you microwave it for 30 seconds.

I got up my nerve to try to make one more batch of jelly this evening and I was so careful in measuring and going exactly by the sequence of adding the ingredients, leaving nothing to chance or memory and I have poured it up into jars and all I can say until morning is that it looks like jelly, it smells like jelly, so now if it will shake like jelly, I will have redeemed myself. You’ve heard of the old song, "It must be jam because jelly don’t shake like that". Well maybe it was before your time but it was a Glenn Miller tune. The first batch I made didn’t shake, it poured and when I recooked it it wouldn’t move with a hammer. Who knows maybe this new batch will be a winner in the food division at the Fair and Rodeo this month.

I have read enough on jelly making to write my own book. I now have read how to re-do jelly, make it the first time, what kind of pectin to use, how to test for ‘setting’, even how to use Sure Jel or Certo to pass a drug test if the need should arise. Yes, while Googling I was guided to a site on "How to Pass a Drug Test". Seems you mix up the pectin in water and drink it down. I wonder how or IF that really works. If it won’t make my jelly jell then I’d be suspicious of it making someone pass a drug test. What if it just got into your innards and ‘set up’ and you had to find a way to blast it out?

You can find all sorts of information on the Internet and now I bet I get all sorts of pop up ads on How to Pass a Drug Tests and all that will be on my computers’ cookies or whatever you call them. The verdict is still out on my jelly because three of the really small jars have begun to jell and the majority of the others that are large have not set. I have quite a bit of Grape syrup to give away if you need any. This deja vu jelly making is getting me down ‘all over again.’