Peanut Butter and Jelly

A few years ago (I really have no idea how many, three? four? five maybe?), I aban­doned the prac­tice of eat­ing lunch out. I used to eat out five days a week, but it got to the point that I could no longer afford to do so.

I started “brown­bag­ging” it. A cooler, sev­eral cans of caf­feine free Coca-​Cola, and two peanut but­ter and jelly sand­wiches. The first jelly was what I found in the fridge, Welch’s Grape Jelly. Then a few jars of Smuckers.

Over time, when Debby and I did any trav­el­ing, I started buy­ing jars of jam at var­i­ous gift shops, winer­ies and other retail stores that we stopped in. As the cans of Coca-​Cola decreased with bot­tles of water replac­ing them, I also began to learn what I wanted in a jam.

I much pre­fer pre­serves to jelly; I like to have some pieces of fruit in the jam. I learned that if the sug­ars were over ten grams in a table­spoon, it would be too sweet (today there is only water in the cooler, no Coca-Cola.…not even in the house!). Also, I avoid any jam that lists corn syrup or any thing like it in the ingre­di­ants. I also pre­fer that the ingre­di­ant list begins with the appro­pri­ate fruit and the fewer ingre­di­ants the better.

Two week­ends ago, Debby had a week­end with her daugh­ter in St. Louis. One of the places they went to was the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den. While there, Debby, being the lov­ing, thought­ful per­son she alway is, bought a jar of jam for me. She checked the label. No corn syrup and 2 grams of sugar per serving.

It did not take long for me to check the nutri­tion label when Debby gave me the pre­serves. “Two grams of sugar…gee, that might not be sweet enough,” I thought to myself. But I had just recently fin­ished off a jar of jam that had only five grams of sugar and it was excel­lent. So I looked for­ward to try­ing my new preserves.

Just a cou­ple of days later, I fin­ished the jar I was using and opened my new pre­serves. I made the sec­ond sand­wich with the new stuff, the first sand­wich with the last of the pre­vi­ous jar. Then I licked the knife.

It tasted very sweet.

When I ate the sand­wiches, I knew imme­di­ately when I bit into the one with the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den Black­berry Pre­serves. It was sweet. Very sweet. Too sweet.

There is no way in heck that those pre­serves have only two grams of sugar per serv­ing. That jar is so sweet, I can’t even believe that the two is a mis­print for twelve. Twenty one maybe. It is not edible.

I will fur­ther com­ment that the pre­serves have a tex­ture more akin to jelly than to pre­serves. There is lit­tle if any pieces of fruit. It is hard for me to judge due to the over­whelm­ing sweet­ness, but the black­berry fla­vor that I think I maybe can detect is good.

I won­der if Debby can get her money back?

Tagged as: Jam, Peanut Butter and Jelly