Onion jam update!

A couple of people have asked how the onion jam turned out, and how the swap was.

The jam was SO SO GOOD. I highly recommend making a batch. Make sure you really cook the onions for a long time - you want them soft and brown and sweet. There's no need to process the jam - I'd say after adding all of the post-caramelizing ingredients, stir a lot for maybe 20 minutes, fish out the rosemary if it's still intact, and put the jam in a container in the fridge. It will probably keep fine for about three weeks and would be amazing on turkey sandwiches, or dolloped on pork chops.

The swap was a fun success! There were 10 people there, and I brought 7 jars to swap. Everyone had an open container of their goodies so people could sample, and then the selection process began. We were each assigned a number from one to ten and took turns choosing what we wanted to take home; the selection process went from 1-10 and then backwards from 10-1, and was repeated until we were all done. The first two choosers chose my jam!

There's an honor system in place - since I brought 7 items, I got to choose a total of 7 things, but no one was tracking me. I took home a great haul: beer, limoncello, that quince paste called membrillo that you get on cheese plates sometimes, German mustard pickles, tomato jam, and TWO jars of a BBQ sauce I really really liked.

I liked that some people thought outside the box in terms of offering size - the beer was actually 3 bottles of a homemade IPA; one couple brought small containers of three different things and if a person chose their items, they could have two items count as one selection

All in all it was really fun and well-organized. It was over in an hour, and I'm looking forward to the next one in about six months... and I'm already pondering what I might make!