‘When you said you wanted to do something in the kitchen I thought you meant more decorating.’ Graham was putting on his coat, but he appeared troubled. She may have been a little misleading when she’d spoken to him earlier, but needs must. She was sure even Marks and Spencer had had to bend the truth a little to get to where they were.
‘Ah, no, but you’ll never know I was here,’ she said, getting out yet another saucepan. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘What time are you leaving?’ Her father looked quite alarmed.
She paused.How long did jam take to make?She wondered. ‘I’ll be gone by bedtime.’
Graham seemed to relax a little. He zipped up his anorak. ‘Bye then.’ His voice hesitant, he picked up a large holdall and a suit carrier and left.
Regan clapped her hands together. ‘Right. This is where the magic begins!’
Her initial enthusiasm was short-lived. She read and reread the instructions for pineapple jam and realised there were a few things that didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘Add pectin.’ What the hell was that? She’d seen it mentioned when she’d been scrolling through jam-making websites, but she thought it was something that was already in fruit. A quick Google check told her she was right, so she ignored the recipe’s request for pectin and continued. She had purchased a lime and lots of sugar from the local shop, so she felt reassured that this would all be fine.
An hour later, she was ready to quit.
The pineapple was ludicrously difficult to prepare. Bythe time she’d cut out the core and sliced off the bobbly surface and the sharp stalky bit that had nearly taken her eye out, there was hardly anything left. The recipe had told her to pulp it, but that was impossible without some sort of kitchen equipment, so she’d chopped it into oblivion.
If she’d thought the pineapple was a challenge, it was nothing compared to the coconut. Firstly, none of the recipes she’d printed had any mention of fresh coconut, only tinned coconut milk, which she didn’t have; and she’d nearly lost a finger when the knife had slipped when she was trying to get into the sodding coconut in the first place.
She had managed to save a tiny amount of the liquid inside the coconut, which she’d chucked into the saucepan with her massacred pineapple. After that, it had taken a good hour to obliterate the coconut flesh into tiny flakes, but she’d done it. She added an unhealthy amount of sugar and the juice of the lime, and with an exuberant flourish she lit the gas under the pan. All it had to do now was boil. Job done.
She hoped the onion marmalade would be a lot easier. She’d bought some vinegar for this recipe and was planning on raiding her dad’s cupboard for the few spices some of the websites had suggested. She was keen to invent her own flavour rather than steal someone else’s, so she didn’t want it to be too planned.
A lot of tears and swear words later, she had a pile of chopped onions and she hated every one. Her eyes were stinging and the finger she’d cut when attacking the coconut was smarting like hell. She tipped all the ingredients into the next two saucepans, added some chilli flakes she’d found, and went to wash her hands.
Returning to the pineapple and coconut mixture, she inspected it carefully. It was bubbling happily in the smallest saucepan, which seemed like a good sign. But it was looking very runny and didn’t look to be thickening at all. She left it to bubble while she tackled the plums. All the recipes she’d found had been for plain old plum jam, but Regan knew that wasn’t going to be good enough to impress Bernice. She needed a quirky edge. Something that made it different. Regan pulled out all of her dad’s spices and gave each one a sniff. With the exception of the cardamom they all smelt like sawdust and were years out of date. ‘Okay, cardamom and plum jam it is then,’ she said, and she got on with the next batch.
Regan shut the door on everything gurgling merrily in the kitchen and took her shiny new jam jars to the bathroom to wash them properly before sterilising. She’d have more space to lay them out in the bathroom, and she’d already used every surface in the small kitchen. After washing them carefully and placing them on a brand-new baking tray exactly how she’d seen it in a YouTube video, she proudly carried them back through.
When she opened the door, it was like discovering a chemical weapons factory. The strength of the boiling vinegar in the onion marmalade took her breath away and most likely took a layer off her lungs. The pineapple jam looked like a mini volcano as it spewed merrily over the sides of the tiny saucepan, and the plum jam appeared to be trying to launch itself into space; splats were erupting out of the saucepan and all over the newly painted kitchen.
‘Shittity shittington!’ Regan wasn’t sure where to start but, ever the optimist, she popped her clean jars in the oven in case there was anything she could salvage.
‘Hello,’ called her father in an uncharacteristically jolly voice.
‘Hel-lo,’ came Regan’s shaky reply.
‘What the blue blazes?’ Graham surveyed his once-pristine kitchen, which now looked like a mad professor’s laboratory.
‘You’re early,’ said Regan, switching off the gas and marvelling at the amount of jet-black jam that was now welded to the cooker top.
‘It’s …’ Graham pointed at the kitchen clock, ‘… tomorrow.’ It was ten past midnight.
‘Really?’ She stared at the clock, then checked her watch. Where had the evening gone? She’d spent most of it wrestling with pineapples and swearing at onions. ‘Sorry. I thought I’d be done.’
‘What have you done, exactly?’ asked Graham, holding his nose.
‘I’m making jam.’ They both looked at the mixtures in the various saucepans. None of them looked like jam, or certainly not any from planet earth.
The timer pinged to tell her the jars could come out of the oven now. Perhaps there was something she could salvage. She lined up the jars and hopefully tipped up the pineapple saucepan, but nothing happened. What was left inside was clinging desperately to the inside of the pan. The onion mixture was a little more mobile, but it needed help. She stopped scooping when she reached the black layer on the bottom. She’d work out how to clean the saucepan later – hopefully there was a YouTube video for that too. The plum mixture looked a little more hopeful, but what any of it tasted like, she really was past caring.
‘Please tell me this isn’t the business venture you were telling me about,’ said her father, unzipping his anorak.
‘It’s called Sticky Situations.’ The irony wasn’t lost on her.
‘Well, that’s appropriate.’
‘If the jam stall fails at least I know I can make reasonable weapons of mass destruction,’ she said, with a smile. Her father shook his head and went to hang up his anorak.
