Pear Jam

My son-in-law, Anthony, gave us some pears from his grandparents' tree. His grandmother has a recipe for pear jam that he said was delicious.  He, also, gave me a copy of her recipe.

The recipe indicates that the jam be cooked for three hours, but his grandmother cooks her jam for six.

So, last night was jam night for Mike and me!  I got home from work and Mike had already cut most of the pears and had them in the pot.  He decided to add a little water so the pear slices wouldn't turn brown.

We weren't sure how much the pears weighed.  Also, the recipe indicated using 5 pounds of sugar plus two cups.  Since we figured we were using about half the pears, we intended to reduce our ingredients by half.  However, we knew we did not have five pounds of sugar in our container, so we guessed and poured it into our jam.

In a few minutes, the pot was totally filled with water (since Mike had added water and then the pears created their own juice.)  We removed some of the water.

As you can see, we don't worry too much about precision!

Our pear jam cooked about 3 1/2 hours but I was worried that the mixture was still too loose.  So, I called Anthony to ask him how his jam looked just before he put it in jars.  When I told him what we had done (adding water - I didn't tell him about the vast amount of guessing of ingredients that went on!!), there was dead silence on the other end of the phone.  We really shocked him with our cooking abilities : (

So, we cooked the jam a while longer before putting it into the jars.

Our taste test went well - I'll go home and open a jar tonight to see if I have jam or pear soup!

I consider it another life adventure!