Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Range through the jam shelves of your local fancy-food shop (or your own pantry), and you'll find a lot of fancy-pants jam. You know the kind I mean: the ones with four fruits and three spices and a couple of liqueurs thrown in, the kiwi-lime-guava preserves, the blueberry-tangerine-coriander-gewurztraminer jellies. These are especially prevalent in tourist areas with gourmet pretensions (hello, Napa!) where the desired clientele is looking for pricier thrills than the usual fudge and hot sauce.

Someone, maybe you, is buying these, opening the jar once, and then consigning it to a sticky eternity behind the tarragon-Riesling mustard in the fridge door. And short of being dug out once more to glaze a chicken breast, there it stays, while on the front shelf the plain old jar of Smuckers strawberry is replaced again and again.

How do I know this? Because I'm insatiably, sneakily curious about everyone's eating and shopping habits. Lately I've been doing a lot of house-sitting for friends (and friends of friends), and I'll admit it: if I'm sleeping in your house, whatever is under your bed or stashed in your medicine cabinets is safe from me. Furry pink handcuffs, the leftover magic mushrooms from Burning Man, leather whatever: I'll never even bother to look.

By the time you get back, however, I will be able to give you a full inventory of your kitchen. I will know if you have a muffin pan (and puzzle mightily for hours if you don't), whether you drink tea or coffee, and where you keep the grater and the whisks. Is your baking powder is this year's vintage or bought 3 boyfriends ago? Did you even know there was a unopened package of candied ginger at the back of the cupboard next to the fridge? I won't drain your special single malt or break into the $10 Scharffenberger baking bar, but I'll know you better by the company your pantry keeps.

And what you're not eating are those fancy jams. I also know this because, like most beginning jam makers, I used to make those kinds of jams, and give them to you as lovely house presents at any opportunity. The rum-brown-sugar-peach-nectarine preserves, I was so proud of them! The Meyer lemon chutney from food writer/novelist Laurie Colwin's recipe, carefully aged for a couple months just as she recommends. Blueberry with Cointreau, plums with Bordeaux: I made them, you accepted them with grace (thanks, Mom!) and then you hinted, ever so gently, that maybe you didn't want rum anything on your toast in the morning. What you wanted was what everyone wants: Strawberry jam. Apricot preserves. Blackberry jelly. Raspberry jam, straight up and tasting of summery sun-warmed fruit, with just enough sugar to round out the fruit's natural sweetness.

So these are the jams I make now, and if you want the recipients of your jam-making largesse to actually devour your wares with pleasure, rather than sadly leaving them on the shelf, testaments to more good will than good mornings, this is what you will do, too.

Start with the best and most-loved, strawberry jam. But not the easiest. For all its gingham-y, morning-in-America, come on in and sit right down and make yourself at home aura, the strawberry actually has some fussy little habits. For starters, pectin. Or the lack of it: strawberries are right up there with cherries in the low-pectin pantheon. Which means that unlike its high-pectin friend, the blackberry (which practically jams itself given a little sugar and a quick, frothing boil), strawberries need a little persuasion to form anything like a gel.

You could, of course, get a bottle of Sure-Jel or a packet of powdered pectin and make perfectly bounceable strawberry jam every time. I never do. There's nothing wrong with packaged pectin; it's a natural product, usually derived from apples or lemons. But a fruit mixture gels when the pectin is exposed to a particular ratio of sugar to acid. When you bump up the amount of pectin in the mix, you have to add a correspondingly large amount of sugar to make the science work. You'll get a firm set, but the resulting jam will be, to my taste, unremittingly sweet.

Anyway, there's no need. In my experience, you can make jam from just about anything using nothing more than fruit, sugar, and a lemon or two. Simple, easy, and spontaneous, depending on what's ripe in your backyard, your neighbor's yard or at the market.

So, back to our little diva princess, the strawberry. Her real friends are the best and oldest ones: sugar and time. But let me introduce her newest BFF, tart to her sweet, rosy pink to her ruby red. Yes, I'm talking about rhubarb, the prettiest pink stalk you ever did see. It's a perennial plant, growing from a crown and sending up long, celery-like stalks every spring that start out green and flush pink-red as the weather warms. The broad leaves look like spinach, but are mildly toxic and should never be eaten.

Sometimes called pie plant, rhubarb is one of the happiest harbingers of spring, arriving just as the first strawberries begin to appear in the market, a welcome tang of fruity pink at a time when the delights of local cherries and apricots are still a good month away. You can match rhubarb with strawberry in any ratio: a lot of rhubarb with just a few berries for sweetness, or plenty of strawberries with just a little rhubarb for texture and tartness. Which reminds me: if you've never had rhubarb before, you won't forget your first taste of it raw. Like sorrel, another lively spring arrival, it's tongue-twistingly sour.

Crunchy-firm when raw, rhubarb collapses when cooked into what can only be described as a lush stringiness. The easiest way to cook it is as a simple compote: chopped rhubarb tossed with sugar, left to sit for 15 minutes or so, then gently simmered until tender. If you're adding strawberries, just toss them into the rhubarb off the heat and let them soften in the residual warmth. It's good hot, cold, by itself, spooned over ice cream or mixed into yogurt.

After years of loving strawberry-rhubarb compote every spring, it seemed only natural to try adding some to my strawberry preserves. This would thicken up the runniness that these preserves can be heir to, while adding a dimension of fruity tartness.

For the first step, you'll need to macerate the strawberries in sugar for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours, i.e., overnight. You nip off the green hulls and cut up the berries--halves if small, quarters or smaller if large--and put them in a large glass or ceramic bowl. Sprinkle on the sugar, mix gently, cover and walk away. If it's very hot where you are, put them in the fridge, but otherwise, room temp is fine. Every couple of hours, if you think of it, give them a gentle stir to make sure the sugar is dissolving evenly.

By morning, the sugar will have draw out much of the liquid trapped inside the berries, and you'll have some slightly shrunken-looking berries floating in a lot of cough-syrup-red liquid. Add the juice of a lemon and the chopped rhubarb, then dump the whole thing into a non-aluminum pot. Bring to a simmer and let cook for 2 or 3 minutes, then pour back to the big bowl.

Cover again, this time with a clean dish towel so steam can escape, and let sit for another 4 to 6 hours. Look again, and you'll see some now majorly shrunken berries and cubes of rhubarb bobbing in even more, now slightly darker, red liquid. You're getting close now!

Now, here's the trick, and credit goes to the sublime Helen Witty, whose books Fancy Pantry and Good Stuff (now both out of print, but available at amazon.com or the library) are infallible resources for all kinds of pantry-stocking recipes.

So, put a colander over a large, preferably wide and short (rather than narrow and tall) non-aluminum pot. Dump in your strawberry mixture and let all the liquid drain into the pot. Set the fruit-filled colander aside, and bring the liquid to a boil. Let it boil vigorously for some 10 to 15 minutes, until the liquid has darkened and thickened to a syrupy consistency.

By subjecting the liquid, not the fruit, to the bulk of the boiling, the fruit stays fresh and vivid. Once the liquid has thickened, add the fruit and cook, stirring frequently, for another 3 to 5 minutes, until mixture has thickened and looks like jam. It's that simple, really.

Good as they are on toast, these preserves also make a wonderful addition to French toast. Take a thick slice of challah bread and cut a pocket into the side. Beat cream cheese until fluffy, adding honey and vanilla extract to taste. Spread a spoonful of cream cheese and a spoonful of preserves inside the pocket, then dip in a mixture of egg and milk. Fry in butter over medium heat until golden brown and gently puffed on each side. Serve with maple syrup or powdered sugar.

Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Strawberry Rhubarb Preserves

Makes 4 to 5 half-pint jars

Ingredients:
4 pint boxes strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and halved or quartered
2 to 2 1/2 cups sugar
1 lb rhubarb, trimmed and chopped
1 lemon, juiced

Preparation:

1. In a large ceramic or glass bowl, toss berries with sugar. Cover and let rest, stirring occasionally, for 4 to 8 hours.

2. Add chopped rhubarb and juice of 1 lemon to strawberry mixture. Pour into a large, shallow non-reactive pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Pour back into bowl, cover with a clean dishtowel and let rest for another 4 hours or so.

3. Set a colander over the same pot. Pour strawberry mixture into colander and let drain. Remove colander and set aside.

4. Bring liquid to a boil and let boil, stirring occasionally, for 10-15 minutes, or until liquid has thickened to a syrupy consistency.

5. Add fruit, reduce heat, and cook, stirring frequently, until fruit looks glossy and translucent and mixture has thickened to a softly jammy consistency, about 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

6. Spoon into sterilized canning jars and top with two-part canning lids. Place filled, sealed jars into a pot of boiling water to cover, and let simmer for 8 minutes. Remove jars and let cool undisturbed. Check for seals and store in a cool, dry place. Or, spoon preserves into clean, empty jars and top with lids. Let cool at room temperature, then refrigerate for up to 1 month.

Chickens pecking around the backyard, kombucha fermenting on the shelf, beer brewing in the closet: there's been a lot of interest in DIY urban homesteading lately. For months now, I've been meaning to get into the slow-process stuff, like curing my own olives and making my own vinegar.

Then again, my homestead is a wee share house in Bernal, already stuffed with other people's tchotchkes. I've commandeered the tiny back patio with my buckets of tomato and potato plants; adding an olive crock and a vinegar barrel might be pushing it.

And honestly, I'm still wedded to the easy delights of jam. Like pie, it's a little bit of a production, but just like pie, no matter what you do, fruit+sugar=sweet fruity goodness. And like homemade pie, homemade jam is better than anything you can buy. Why? Because anywhere this side of Smuckers, you're using more fruit and less sugar when you make your jam at home.

Ah yes, the sugar issue. First off: most cookbooks call for way too much sugar. Why? The more sugar you put in, the easier it is to get a firm and reliable set. Sugar is also a preservative, and jam with a lot of sugar will last longer in your fridge. But capturing the essence of beautiful fruit is the whole point of jam, rounded out with just enough sweetness to bring a smile to your toast. Halve the amount of sugar in most recipes, and you'll do just fine.

For the same reason, I never use commercial pectins, like Sure-Jel. There's nothing wrong with pectin itself; it's a natural compound found in varying levels in all fruits. However, commercial pectin requires a lot of sugar to jump-start that jelling reaction, and the precise formulas turn canning into chemistry, with no adjustments for personal taste.

But with less sugar and no added pectin, won't your jam be a runny mess? Nope! There's an easy, just about foolproof way to get good jam every time, and all you need is sugar, lemon juice, and time.

Take a look at this bowl.

That's 4 pints of strawberries, sliced, mixed with sugar and left to sit overnight until they've shrunken into little berry quarters bobbing in a sea of juice. All that liquid was originally trapped in the berries themselves, and you'd be boiling it mightily for a long time if you just threw the fruit and sugar together and tossed them on the stove.

But separate the liquid from the fruit, add a little lemon juice (which is rich in pectin), and--here's the trick-- cook down the liquid, not the fruit. By cooking the liquid by itself first, you can evaporate any excess water without exhausting the fruit's delicate flavors. There's also less risk of burning and sticking when you're just simmering juice.

This is a technique I first picked up from Helen Witty's invaluable, library-available collection, The Good Stuff Cookbook. In my copy, the jam chapter is wrinkled and spattered on every page, with annotations, additions, and comments in pen and pencil from years of messing around. I use a lot less sugar than Witty does, but her method (streamlined here) still works like a charm to produce delicious jams just thick enough to cling to your biscuit, redolent of ripe, sunwarmed summer fruit.

Since strawberries are ripe and wonderful this week, now's the time to grab a case of jars, a flat of fruit, and get your birthday-and-holiday gifts nailed down. I love Albion berries in particular, but Seascapes, Tristars and Chandlers, all varieties that do well in our cool coastal climate, won't do you wrong, either.

If you want your sealed jars to be able to sit around in the pantry, you need real canning jars topped with two-part lids. Otherwise, if you're just going to stick your jam in the fridge immediately and eat it soon, you can reuse any clean, cute glass jar you have. For best results, sterilize any jar in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes before using.

Strawberry Jam

Ingredients:
4 pint boxes whole strawberries (2 1/2 lbs)
1 1/2-2 cups granulated sugar, depending on sweetness of berries
juice of 1 lemon, about 2 tablespoons

Preparation:
1. Rinse, drain, and hull strawberries. Slice in halves or quarters. In a nonreactive bowl, toss berries with sugar and lemon juice. Cover and let stand for 3-4 hours at room temperature or 6 hours to overnight in the refrigerator. Stir occasionally, scraping the bottom of the bowl to distribute and dissolve the sugar.

2. When sugar is dissolved and berries are floating in a bright-red syrup, pour into a large nonreactive pot. Bring to a frothy simmer, stirring frequently. Let simmer for 2 minutes, then pour back into bowl. Let cool. Cover and let stand for 2-3 hours at room temperature, or in the refrigerator for 6 hours or overnight.

3. Meanwhile, sterilize your jars, lids, and rings. Set a colander or strainer over a wide, large, and heavy stainless steel or enameled cast-iron pot. Pour berries into colander, letting all the syrup drip into the pot. Remove colander full of berries and set aside.

4. Bring syrup to a boil over medium heat, stirring frequently. Once syrup comes to a boil, stir and watch: it will move from what looks like a pot full of Kool-Aid to a seething, deep-garnet mass of thick, glossy bubbles. Dip a metal spoon into the syrup and let syrup drip off the side of the spoon; it's ready when the last few drops are fairly thick and sticky.

5. Pour in reserved berries. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. If you'd like a thicker jam, mash berries lightly with a potato masher. Simmer for 5-8 minutes, until berries are translucent and mixture has thickened slightly. Scoop into jars and seal.

6. Set jars on a clean towel and do not touch or move them until they are completely cool. If you're using canning jars, listen for the slurpy sucking pop of the jars vacuum-sealing. Sealed jars will keep up to 1 year in a cool, dry place. If jar isn't sealed, store in fridge and eat within 2-3 weeks.