Strawberry Chipotle Jam with Liquid Pectin

Oh hey, remember when this used to be a food blog and not a blog about Hackbright?

Right.

So one of my friends gifted us a jar of strawberry chipotle jam for Christmas a few years ago and it was fantastic. I've been making a variation of it ever since, but it's been been awhile. For whatever reason, it's always been easier for me to get liquid pectin and all of the recipes I've seen call for powdered pectin. Here's my converted recipe because I originally started this blog as a way for me to catalog things that I thought I'd want to come back to and I'm kicking myself for not writing this down earlier.

Everything is better with a highly enthusiastic child in the background

Strawberry Chipotle Jam with Liquid pectin

1 c (or 1/2 lb) strawberries, chopped
1 chipotle pepper, minced
1 c (or 100 g) granulated sugar
4 t lemon juice
3 T liquid pectin

1. Combine strawberries, chipotle, sugar and lemon juice. Bring to a rolling boil for 1 full minute.
2. Stir in pectin and bring back to a rolling boil for at least 1 minute
3. Make sure that the jam is sheeting and remove from heat
4. Let the jam cool a bit and then pour into a pint-size mason jar.

I like to consider this "nano-batching" because it just makes a jar and then you don't need to worry about the canning aspect of jam making. Be sure to refrigerate the leftover pectin.

Cook Roulette

Oh hey, I have a blog.

I spent 5 weeks busting my butt trying to make an app. I succeeded in that. Hooray!

Cook Roulette is a random meal generator. I'd go into details, except that I spent an extreme amount of time on my github readme document, so I'll just direct you there.

My log in page is my favorite page because CRONUTS.

Also, it's live. Go to https://cookroulette.herokuapp.com. Once you click on the meal generation page, you can check the Yummly button to use its API and get a recipe suggestion based on the randomly generated ingredients.

It was so insanely easy to deploy that I want to make other random apps just because I can. I'm thinking about working on two different projects. I'd like to use Django in one, but I'm not really certain what I want it to be. The other one is a game that I'd like to make (mostly for my friends and me) written in JavaScript (gasp. I know) using Firebase as the database. Firebase is really really cool.

My biggest project, however, is getting a job. I have a couple interviews lined up, so fingers crossed that those go well. A lot of people are trying to be strategic about when they apply to places, but honestly, I'm going to believe that I'm a competent software engineer and I'm qualified to apply for junior development roles right now. Perhaps I should be more cautious about when to apply to places, but if I wait until I'm comfortable, I'll never apply anywhere because comfortable is not typically my state of mind.