Because today was my usual Friday off, and this week was going to be a short week anyway (especially since we’re flying up to Seattle tomorrow night), and also because my accumulated vacation balance is getting dangerously close to the upper limit (I know, I should be taking it on a more regular basis but I just never get around to it), I decided to use this all as an excuse to take 3 days off (next week) and give myself a nice long break.

I started my little mini vacation by getting up bright and early on this morning to start baking massive quantities of pumpkin bread, as tomorrow is the annual church bazaar and I agreed to provide some loaves for the bake sale. Luckily the bread takes an hour and a half to bake, because as I was mixing up the first batch I realized that I was completely out of a number of key ingredients (like, say, flour and sugar) necessary to make any more. So I popped the first two loaves into the oven, then tromped back downstairs, got dressed, and zipped off to the grocery store to stock up on baking supplies.

I made 8 loaves of bread, total, but two of them got stuck to the pan and there wasn’t really any saving them (I swear I did not do that on purpose), so gee, darn, they had to stay with us. I did slice up half of one loaf and take it into my office, along with the half dozen loaves that turned out non-shredded, because my coworker said she’d be willing to drop them off at the church for me, but we’ve been slowly nibbling away at the rest ever since.

I also finally started tackling the pomegranates that have been sitting on counter since we picked them up last Sunday. I would like to note, for the record, that one of the many reasons why granite is an awesome choice for countertop is that it does not stain. Because pomegranates are very messy little critters, and I had two huge grocery sacks full of them, and by the time I had shucked enough to make two batches of jelly, there was juice *everywhere*. I am continually amazed by how far pomegranates can spit. Luckily the tiles we picked for the backsplash also do not stain. Neither do the cabinets. Or, for that matter, the floor.

Pomegranate jelly is one of those fussy recipes that I have fought with for years. The first time I made it, most of the jelly set, but ever since then, we’ve had mixed results, and there were years when we were lucky to get even 50% of the jars to set. My friends and I could never figure out what it is we were doing wrong. Turns out, it wasn’t us. It was the pectin. A friend at my knitting group mentioned that her mom had the same problem, and they finally narrowed it down to the brand of pectin. It is wacky, because, well, pectin is pectin and this should really not make the slightest bit of difference, but guess what? It does.

The first batch I screwed up, adding the sugar too early, so when it didn’t set I wasn’t surprised, and at some point in the near future I’ll try some triage on the entire batch to see if I can some fix it.  But the second batch set beautifully. Hooray!

So now the entire house smells wonderfully of pumpkin bread and pomegranate jelly, and there are 7 jars of jelly cooling on my counter (we are going to ignore the 7 jars of…uh…pomegranate ‘syrup’ sitting beside them). And as soon as I go out and buy yet more sugar (jelly making takes a *lot* of sugar) and more of the *right* kind of pectin), I can tackle the rest of the pomegranates and see how much more surface area I can splatter with them in the process.