When it comes to cooking, I’m pretty darn good.  I follow recipes well and I can make up a few things on the fly, and I get the general gist of making food not taste bad or burnt, undercooked or full of salmonella.

chunky berry sauce

Now that it is summer, there is a lot of fresh produce, and I recently found myself with a lot of strawberries from a sale. After eating some on toast with Nutella, in a smoothie, and just cut up with a pinch of sugar, I still had about 2 quarts left.  I wanted to use them on one large recipe, and nothing too much with a baked good, since I’d just made Blueberry Muffins. I used Ina Garten’s recipe for strawberry preserves as an easy way to use up a lot of them at once, before they went bad and I had shame over wasting food and money.  I learned that I should have read the comments in this recipe before starting.  As far as jam goes, this came out bad.  It never set in the fridge, even though I used her frozen-plate method of checking if it was jelling, which it was.  Also, I used a lot less sugar than the recipe called for, whether or not that had anything to do with this, who knows.  After putting it in a jar and putting it in the fridge, it never set as a whole.
 
So I had this whole jar of strawberry-goo that I had no idea what to do with, and intended to have less food-shame over wasting it inevitably as it went bad, because I did try to do something with it.  But within two days, my boyfriend made pancakes and I had the bright idea to just heat it up again in a saucepan and then put it on pancakes.  Good stuff!  Apparently, I made strawberry sauce, not jam.