Living up to My Name

I'm not trying to get all "Julie & Julia" on you with this excessive food blogging, but I do want to talk about jam for just a minute.

I used about ten tiny purple plums and three handfuls of granulated sugar to make enough jam to fill a Bonne Maman jam jar. Heat, stir, cool.

I'm learning that in order to make a thing, in general, you heat it, stir it, and cool it. Hot fruit, hot milk, hot beans. This makes thinking about cooking much easier. It also helps to think about what an Ancient Greek might have done to preserve whatever you're trying to cook. How can I eat all this rotten fruit? What can I do with this sour milk? How can I prevent this meat from going bad in this damp Aegean heat?

I like that my understanding of the principles of food preparation is about as basic as learning to speak another language, starting with nouns and moving onto verb conjugation…

…which is something I have to do, stat. Does anyone have a crack copy of a German Rosetta Stone I can borrow?