1 hour sweat = 1 jar jelly

The wild berries are ripe--I think they're black raspberries, although they're a bit smaller like wineberries. There are briar patches all over town loaded with berries, but you have to be quick because by next weekend they'll all be done. So I set out the morning of the 4th with my wooden berry bucket to gather all I could. I was able to pick about 3 quarts of berries, which is half a grocery sack. They go bad within a couple days of picking, so today I made seedless jelly. Squeezing the juice from a cheesecloth sack of fruit is always oddly fun, with the dark red juice it looked like a giant heart bleeding. Ok, I have problems, I'll be the first to admit it. I used Pomona's Universal Pectin this time, which allows for any amount (or none) of sugar you want to use (Hooray!). It gelled really hard, which is difficult for non-sugared recipes normally, but I want to taste it before I totally jump on the bandwagon. After I was done I decided to put up corn relish too, since we've already gone through half the jars I made last week. I was looking at the jars of cooling jelly and realized that the number of jars was equal to the number of hours I spent out in the sun picking berries and standing over boiling pots of water making the jelly. I definitely am a process not a product person. I love trying to explain conversions like that to people who really don't get it.