Jam success!

This winter I started making jam (mostly b/c I wanted to make useful holiday presents.) Now I am OBSESSED with the process but haven't been enthralled with all of my results so far. (Except the Meyer lemon and satsuma marmalade, which is just dreamy.) The satsuma-cardamom-bourbon and tangelo marmalades failed to set (although both are excellent stirred into hot toddies, or wine spritzers), all the strawberry preserves (including the Christine Ferber recipe, fie) have been tooth-achingly sweet, the grapefruit marmalade (a Nigella Lawson recipe, fie again) turned out incredibly bitter, etc.

This weekend I forsook all my buy-local-from-small-farms principles in the name of rhubarb, which I love passionately, and made jam using this recipe (although I used rosemary instead of sage, b/c my sage plant is kind of sparse right now, and I found that the mixture took about 45 minutes to cook) and got 3 half-pints out of it and had a couple tablespoons left over to eat straight out of the pot and OH MY GOD IT IS PERFECTION. I look forward to making the recipe with, you know, the actual ingredients called for, and in larger quantities - I want to be secure in the knowledge of having pints of this stuff waiting after rhubarb disappears from the grocery store.