We opened one of the last jars of my mom’s guava jelly this morning. That makes it a special morning.

It’s marked in her handwriting.

Guava Jelly

22 May

H

My mom’s been gone since January 2013. The last guava tree died of inattention during her final years at home, when she could no longer get out to water and prune and fuss over the plants.

The jar is dated 22 May. Year unknown.

I opened the top and flipped out the wax that she poured into the top to seal it from the air. The seal did its job.

The jelly is wonderful, a deep rich red color, almost black. And the taste is just as deep and rich. Amazing that tastes can bring back vivid memories. My mom in her tiny kitchen, boiling the guavas for hours, then hanging the mush in cheesecloth to let the raw juice drip through, then back to the stove with sugar and what-all, cooked to just the right jelly stage before bottling. And then the joy of another batch of fresh jelly to consume.

When the guava crop was good, there were too many fruit. She would cook and freeze the juice, to be pulled out during the off-season. Little was wasted, although the birds did get their share.

My sister was the keeper of the recipe and the process after my mom died. Now she’s gone, and I’m left with the recipe. And it’s a recipe that started when my mom was studying food and nutrition in the home economics department at the University of Hawaii in the 1930s. Her recipes changed over the years as she figured out that the chemistry of modern ingredients was different, and tried to adjust for those effects. So to say this is a time tested recipe would be an understatement.

I guess it’s time to plant another guava tree and give this a try.

As I recall, I got this t-shirt during the period of the late-1990s when I was cooking with habanero peppers.

These are among the hottest of the hot peppers available, and I would dice a pepper and throw it my cooking. It made for hot pasta sauces, hot curries, hot stir fry meals. The problem was that, in retrospect, the peppers were really too hot for the way I was using them. They overpowered everything. Meda finally pulled the plug when she said she decided she could not eat certain of my concoctions.

So the habanero has been banished from the kitchen. Instead, we’re growing and harvesting those little local red peppers. I have to admit that I don’t know the name for this variety.

Note part of my former Hawaiian Treasure Craft collection in the background. Unfortunately, I discovered that the humid, salty air blowing in from the ocean attacked the plain brown glaze on most of the pieces. I finally gave my collection away to save it. That was a difficult decision.