There are so many foods that I once thought I hated and have since been proven wrong about. Not having been exposed to a wide variety of foods when I was young, I just wrote off most unfamiliar items as ‘not for me’. But, I’ve been happily proven wrong over the last few years. The list of surprisingly enjoyable foods includes a great many vegetables (such as cauliflower – one of my absolute favorite veggies), but some have been much more common.
Such as jam. Yes, jam. Delicious, delicious jam.
For 31 years of my life, I thought I hated it. I think the reality is that I’d never really had it before. I’d had jelly (which as it turns out IS actually something that makes me shudder) and just assumed jelly and jam were one and the same. Turns out this is not true AT ALL. And hurrah for that!
I have been sampling jams and preserves of late and am finding them to be such a satisfying and delightful sweet treat – such a great addition to an english muffin or my much revered scones. What is so great about jam, I think, is that the sweetness (if made well) is primarily natural tasting and awakening to the senses. The unnaturalness of so many jellies is a big part of what steered me away from jam for so long. The jelly that you find lining grocery store shelves and slapped on top of peanut butter is either too overloaded with sugar or too crammed full of artificial sweeteners. That is not appealing to me at all, but jam is a different story. Well made, all-natural jam has pushed itself boldly into my little food world.
I just bookmarked a strawberry-rhubarb jam recipe that I intend to make next week with fruit from my CSA box (I’ll tell you about that another time), but for now, for this past weekend, I had the delectable snack you see above.
This delightfully crumbly, slightly sweet biscuit was sliced in two and filled with a healthy dollop of strawberry jam. This biscuit and this jam MADE my Saturday morning. I ate it slowly, in small bites so that I could savor it’s tastiness. I washed my bites down with two cups of coffee from my favorite roaster (I’m looking at you, Stumptown) while alternately reading a book and people watching from the café window seat that I was fortunate enough to snag on a busy weekend morning.
It is moments like that one that I love to start my weekends with. Now that the weekend is over and Monday is here, I wanted to relive the memory of it and start my week off with that feeling of contentment, and maybe share even just a little bit of that contentment with you, too.
Happy Monday. Now go eat some jam.
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