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November is Pomegran-tastic

Every November since the beginning of time, my mom and two friends have cooked up enough pomegranate jelly to fulfill the needs an entire town of 30,000 people for a year. I'd call this team the Pomegrannies, but Mom would kill me. The other two ladies are actually grandmothers. But my mom is not, YET!, and it's all our fault. But I digress.

They made 84 jars of jelly this year. By my calculation, that requires 14 boxes of powdered pectin and about 31 pounds of sugar, or 70 cups. That's 53,900 calories in just the sugar! The 50 or so cups of hand-squeezed pomegranate juice -- at least 100 pomegranates, but they didn't count -- add another 10,000 or so calories. My math tells me that's about 760 calories per jar. I have about eight jars sitting on my kitchen counter right now. Hmmm.

The jars will be decorated with festive ribbons or maybe some rustic raffia and distributed at Thanksgiving dinners, holiday parties, and office gift exchanges; they will be tucked under Christmas trees and Hanukkah bushes (OK, not) and into stockings and gift baskets.

When I was in high school and spent my time reading counterculture lit mags and publishing a zine and keeping up with my punk pen pals, I heard about a woman who was doing a mail-art project. She would send a small, empty glass jar to anyone who promised to fill it with something local and mail it back to her. She got hundreds of jars filled with dirt, broken glass, sand, pebbles, pond water, dead bugs, seaweed, handwritten notes, pee, candle wax, that sort of stuff. I filled my jar with pomegranate jelly and tied a scrap of ribbon around the cap. When she mailed a photo of the finished work, out of the hundreds of jars stacked on shelves on a wall, I could easily pick out the ribbon on my little jar of something local.

My mom entered her jelly into the LA County Fair competition once, but I told her, "Mom, all 271 jars of pomegranate jelly entered into the competition were made with the exact same recipe with pomegranates grown in the same Southern California smog. How do you think the judges decide which one is best? PAYOLA!" She did not win. I was not surprised. Even though I do think the Pomegrannies' jelly is the absolute best in the land.

November 17, 2006 2:34 PM