SassyBlonde

I finally got a basket full of those beautiful figs yesterday which have so tempted passersby on my street for the past week, so I decided to make fig preserves last night. I dug out my grandmother's recipe and set about cutting figs and lemons, and cooked up a right tasty batch. This morning I ran out to get jars and unearthed my mom's boiling pot to process the jars.

Now, if you've never used a boiling process pot before, it's a huge pot which you fill with water to boil the jam jars and kill the germs, as well as seal the lids. When I say huge, I mean HUGE. It took me about ten minutes to fill it up with hot tap water, and when I turned away from the sink I didn't notice that the faucet had gotten turned around to pour water on the counter instead of in the sink. I didn't even notice until I heard it splattering to the floor off of the counter top, at which point there was about a quarter-inch of water pooled up there from the sink all the way over to the oven and water was running across my kitchen tile like a river. I didn't know what to do first-- turn off the water, turn off the jam, put in the jars, who knows. D ran in when I called with an armload of towels and we mopped furiously at the floors and counters until we were both soaked and exhausted.

And for all my troubles? Three tiny jars. Poop.