Hi, C&R. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy.

My dearly beloved little red camera met the fate of every digital camera I get my hands on — its chromed lens cover will never blink again, as far as I can tell. Instead, meet the new love of my life, the awful cameraphone pic. (What can I say, sometimes I’m fickle.)

Squished and mushed and pressured and jarred.

As you can tell, my camera-holding hand is clearly shaking here at the sheer force of awesome laid out on that counter. Ladies and gentlemen, behold six different types of homemade jam — a feat of superhuman endurance, at least for people with attention spans like mine. (To be fair, it was a joint effort between myself and two of my fabulous roommates.)

Top to bottom and left to right: strawberry/white pear, papaya, blackberry, strawberry, pear, mango.

Making jam is like telling a good story. The exposition, where you get to know each of the characters one by one, inside and out — dissecting each fruit and seeing what it’s made of. The slow build, patient stirring, as all the pieces simmer and mix, interacting in new ways in a careful setup. The exciting and borderline dangerous climax, as suddenly everything comes to a boil and all the action must happen immediately at once. (Sear-your-skin hot fruit and boiling jars.) And finally the denouement, the satisfying final pop as everything is neatly sealed.

As perhaps the faithful reader will have noticed in the first photo, we’ve already broken into several of the jars and been pleased with our handiwork. (We were also forced to make biscuits as a jam vehicle, which were consumed long before cameras came out.) Like most homemade food, we have found that this is clearly miles better than anything storebought, but it’s hard to say how much of that is freshness and quality and individual attention and of course our outrageous cooking skills, and how much of it comes from one of the most delicious spices of all, pride.

[That said, the pace at which we produce this vastly outstrips the pace we can consume it, even given that properly sealed jars will keep for up to a year -- so local folks wishing to assess how much of this is the subjective effects of pride and prejudice, we might be able to come to some sort of arrangement...]