In her latest post, Small Hands makes reference to her mother's vociferous objection to her taking cooking classes in high school. Apparently, the thought was that time spent cooking was not time spent on college preparation or some other kind of worthy subject. In my house, the situation was a little different. For years my mom called me the "Home Ec Poster Child" because, no matter how elementary the cooking project, I was doomed to failure. She really, really encouraged me to take ninth grade cooking on the grounds that maybe I'd learn something and wouldn't be destroying her kitchen in the process.


In my school, special emphasis was given to the kinds of foods that latchkey kids could make on their own with minimal fuss: English muffin pizzas, pies made with instant pudding, tuna casserole that kind of thing. I guess I did o.k., since there are no disasters that stand out was being particularly fantastic. I burned a few things and never quite got the hang of making little flowers out of carrot slices, but other than that it was a pretty benign experience. I did fail the Jell-o quiz, but to this day believe that the last question was a trick. My mom was a little disappointed, remembering her high school cooking instruction as full of roasts and omelets and more complicated dishes leading to full meals catered for sports banquets.


Not until college did I catch the cooking bug. My school did not have meal service on weekends (a reflection of its past as primarily a commuter school) so we were on our own with local pizza places or the dorm kitchens. Sometime during freshman year I got it in my head to make a stir fry. I'd never made one before and probably had no idea what I was doing but I forged ahead and I remember it as being great. And that was the beginning. Now (pregnancy yucks aside) I consider myself fairly accomplished in the kitchen and generally pretty fearless.


I'm not sure that high school cooking classes really helped me, but I'm confident that they didn't hurt. I still managed three AP classes, Japanese and accelerated sciences. And just last night we had tuna casserole for dinner. On the whole, it was probably a good idea for me to have taken them given that they didn't interfere with anything else and gave me at least one dish that has lived on well past the time I learned how to make it. I understand that these days cooking is more or less extinct as a high school offering and I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Sure, we should make sure that kids can read and write and learn to settle a disput without weapons but with obesity an increasingly intractable problem, should kids (boys and girls) maybe also learn how to feed themselves without resorting to super-sizing? I imagine that even an English muffin pizza (with a fresh veggie topping, say) is a far sight better than most fast food sandwiches, but how many teens would even think to make one? Shame, really.

It came to me last night as I was falling alseep that maybe Fresca jelly isn't the best idea. Fresca is a diet product that uses artificial sweetener and, if I recall correctly, artificial sweeteners don't take well to heating. Since I'd have to heat the Fresca to add and then activate the pectin this could be a problem. Might work, but just this though has moved Fresca jelly way down the list of canning adventures. Unlike, say, failed raspberry jam I couldn't really use Fresca syrup for much (except for maybe making Fresca by adding carbonated water back into it - but that seems like an awful lot of trouble to get something that I started with in the first place). I might try Squirt instead.


By the way, there is an exception to the don't-heat-artificial-sweeteners rule: Splenda. Last year I ran out of sugar while making my son's Lego-shaped birthday cake. I had on hand a box of bulk Splenda that said I could use it 1-for-1 in place of sugar. Well, better this than nothing, I thought. The result was fabulous! And, because the cake was made in two separate batches (one for the base of the Lego - a 9X13 rectangle - and one for the cupcakes that made up the "nubs" of the Lego) we had a way to compare. The nubs, made with Splenda, were actually better than the base made with sugar. The taste was similar, but the nubs' texture was better. Not a scientific test, of course, but enough to convince me.

Well, I have to get more Orangina since I drank the bottle that was supposed to become jelly. I'm trying to drink more water but I just get so sick of it - and so the soda was opened and consumed. Hopefully, I'll get around to the great jelly test this weekend. If I remember correctly, the 12-week mark began the slow improvement in morning sickness/hyperemesis last time and I'll be 12 weeks on Sunday. I hope I'm not setting myself up for a letdown with my expectations of a nausea-free week next week. We'll see.


My husband and son are off buying vacuum cleaner bags and a new dinette. The vacuum bags are the result of a conversation that went like this:


Husband: Hon, when did you last change the vacuum cleaner bag?


Me: I've never changed the vacuum cleaner bag.


Husband: Oh. Do you know where the replacement bags are?


Me: I've never seen what our bags look like.


Husband: Oh. When was the last time you vacuumed?


Me: You're kidding, right?


The last several places we've lived at hardwood floors that we covered in various spots with shabby, if not chic, throw and area rugs chosen specifically for their 1) cheapness and 2) ability to hide dirt. The new house as wall-to-wall which is going to be replaced with wood as soon as there's room in the budget. For now, it looks like one of us is going to have to get cozy with the vacuum. Ain't gonna be me. I'm not the one who absolutely had to have the 195 pound behemouth. He's the big burly man, let him handle it is what I say.


As for the kitchen table, we're currently using my great-grandparents' Lane, pecan dining room table that I've used for some time as a console table. With the leaves up, it's the perfect size for our kitchen but at nearly 100 years old and being the type of table that is very hard to get these days for any amount of money in the mass-furniture market, I'm feeling like being the daily eating place for a two year old isn't quite the best idea if we want to keep it around for another few years. So off to KMart we are for their made-in-Thailand, $175 special. A butcher-block-esque table and four little chairs. Ought to buy us a couple years, at least. Well, that's what we're hoping.

The Orangina jelly did not happen, mostly because being pregnant sucks. I'm thinking the worst of the morning (meaning: all day) sickness is over, but I still have these tremendous highs and lows - one minute I feel as if I could dig my own swimming pool and the next I can barely walk by the kitchen without wretching. So, while I did not actually make the jelly I did settle on a recipe and procured the ingredients so at the next "high" I'll be ready.


I started by examining standard jelly recipes like grape or apple but realized pretty quickly that this was not what I wanted since these recipes start with actual fruit that is drained in a jelly bag. Since I'll already have a liquid I wanted to find a recipe that starts with a liquid - starting in the middle of the apple jelly recipe didn't seem quite right to me if I could find one that started with, say, apple cider. So I went out and got an apple cider jelly recipe to get some idea of the proportions. Since cider probably has some natural pectin in it where Orangina is most likely pectin-free (despite being 12% juice and 2% pulp, as the label proudly proclaims) I'm going to increase the pectin just a bit. Which means that I'm also going to put some additional sugar into the mix, since that helps keep the pectin from clumping (if you mix the pectin and sugar together before adding to the hot liquid). I'll keep you posted.


Finally, I was reading a book by Dorothy Rodgers today (as is the Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rodgers) entitled "My Favorite Things" published in 1964 by a company the name of which has escaped me. Anyway, in it she talks about the "advantages and disadvantages of live-in help" and goes on about the many sacrifices she makes to keep her cook and waitress happy. The passage concludes with a melancholy statement of missing the "flexibility present in serventless households." That's it! I will no longer think of my home as chaotic, but merely flexible. I think Mrs. Rodgers would be proud.

A quick Google of beer and soda jellies reveals that beer jelly is a well-trodden path but that soda jelly seems to be either avoided or not often attempted. Since I am not a beer lover (despite assurances from many that I would never, ever graduate from Drexel University without developing a taste for the stuff, since Drexel is a seriously, um, rambunctious school) I will start first with some soda jellies. I'll give some thought to the recipe over the next couple days with a goal of producing a prototype batch this weekend. Right now, I'm guessing that I'll need to use a minimum of sugar -just enough to activate the pectin - since soda is already so sweet, and maybe little or no additional liquid. I am going to start with the Orangina, mostly because I love it and it just sounds like would be great to glaze a fruit tart or in little thumbprint-type cookies. After that, who knows? Maybe I'll move on to Jolt because then I can make caffienated sandwiches to keep me awake after lunch.

A very brief discussion of wine and herb jellies this weekend has led me to ponder the possibilities for beer and soda jellies. I can't dwell on this too long with out an attack of the queasies, but here's the brief lowdown: people use wine and/or herb jellies for all kinds of swanky things - brie glazes, canapes, that kind of martha-type food. Could beer jelly be used to glaze, say, a roast? What about top some cream cheese on an habanero cracker? And soda jelly - I knew a woman who used grape jelly in a truly astonishing Swedish-meatball-esque recipe. I wonder if, say, Fresca jelly would be good on anything that would be just as shockingly good as that grape jelly sauce (I think some people put grape jelly in their barbecue sauce, too). As novelties go, this could have interesting possibilities. What about Orangina jelly? Doesn't that sound kind of refreshing?

O.K., here's the deal: We here at HotWaterBath are pregnant. Pregnant in the way that makes all thoughts of food or its preparation white-knuckle experiences. As you can imagine, this is interfering with the whole canning thing (as well as the grocery shopping thing and the clean-up-the-kitchen thing). My dear husband has been taking up the slack as best he can, but with the new job it's been a bit hard for him to do much since he has accrued little in the way of time off or the political capital required to come in late or leave early with no consequences. He's very sweet about the mercurial illness factor - oh! I feel sick. No wait, I feel great - but it's still a huge burden on our family.


To the degree which previous pregnancies are predictors of current or future maternal experiences, this should be passing (more or less) within a month or so - just in time for the beginning of August garden overflow (not mine, though, as we've established) and heading into the harvest season. Perfect! So although I feel like crapola now (and, believe me, this kid is going to be born into a "time out" for doing this to me!) things should straighten out more or less in time to take advantage of the fall canning season. We're in desparate need of tomatoes, so that's on the agenda, as well as salsa, pickled peppers and a few dozen other things. I'm also thinking of being a little more experimental, so if there's anything you'd like me to try, by all means make a suggestion. It's time I expanded my horizons a little. The only things I won't make are sweet pickles of any kind, which are an abomination and a sin against nature.


And finally, just to tie up some loose ends, I'd like to report that the weather in Buffalo was glorious. We went swimming (in both wading and large pools), played in the sandbox, taught the boy wonder how to use a swing and just generally had a great time. My son is one of four grandchildren (soon to be six - my youngest sister is also expecting) and is, so far at least, the only grandson. He was treated as the Crown Prince and has in the space of one week become completely spoiled. In short, the trip was exactly what a summer vacation with the grandparents is meant to be.