In my defense, a lot of recipes start with just fruit and sugar.
So when the first step in the recipe for vanilla-rhubarb jam was, "Bring rhubarb, sugar, and 1 cup of earl grey tea to a boil," it made total sense in my head.
Because it was simplest, this jam was the last of three batches on tonight's docket - so in my further defense, by the time I got to cooking the rhubarb jam, I was pretty tired. But don't listen to me. I'm a dirty liar. I can't really blame my tiredness, because my critical disconnect was something that I'd had in my head since I first skimmed the recipe yesterday.
So I cut up the rhubarb - measured the sugar - cut open a bunch of teabags, since I didn't have loose Earl Grey, to measure out one cup. I wondered how the tea would dissolve and not stay kind of ... ground-y ... once the jam was cooked, but I trust Marisa's recipes. She's the bomb. (Do you see where this is going? Surely, you see where this is going.)
I mixed everything up in the pot and stood there frowning at the mixture, then went back and checked the recipe twice, trying to figure out if I'd missed an instruction to add some sort of liquid. Fruit and sugar cooks down into liquid really fast, but rhubarb is not a fruit. It doesn't hold as much water and it's not going to break down fast enough. I mean -- come on. I'm not dumb. In what universe am I not about to carbonize dry sugar on the bottom of the pan? Where is the liquid in this recipe, Marisa? I trust you but something is wrong. WHERE IS THE LIQU--
Oh.
One cup of Earl Grey tea.
Not tea leaves.
Tea.
I didn't have the energy to rinse the sugar and tea out of the rhubarb and salvage it. Once I stopped flailing and laughing, I dumped the entire mess and decided this was a pretty good indication that I was done canning for the week.
My kitchen smells, overwhelmingly, of bergamot.
