Teaching with jam on it.

A lot of the morning was given up to reading through the DFES ESOL core curriculum. This should come in handy at job interviews: see, I'm a TEFL teacher, (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), which has come to refer to teaching English abroad. Whereas now I want to work at home, teaching those who want to live in Britain, and that's become known as ESL (English as a Second language) or ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The skills are essentially the same, with a slightly different terminology and emphasis, and now I'm learning the wee differences.

Then I made some blackberry jam. The allotment next to mine has blackberry brambles along our boundary, which cause me all manner of grief, but payback comes at this time of year when I can harvest all the fruit on my side. The first crop's yielded a pound of berries. Never made jam before but decided to give it a go this morning. All the info on the internet and in the cookbooks was bewildering. I couldn't ascertain how much natural pectin blackberries have, and we had no pectin in the cupboard (that's those slabs of jelly, isn't it?) So I just boiled the fruit with an equal amount of sugar, and hoyed in a campden tablet to kill off any nasties. After an hour, poured it into sterilised jars (1 LB of fruit makes approx a pint of jam, I've learned), and hey presto! Jam! It's perhaps a wee bit runny, but it tastes delicious.