Some green reasons not to burn a pan ...

As the saying goes, oops!

I wasn't doing badly at all. I needed to switch the fridge freezer off while I was away over Christmas, so I needed to finally make blackberry jam from the 2.5 kilos of frozen blackberries I'd gathered over the past months. I started two days before I left - what can go wrong? I have a proper stainless steel cauldron-type affair, a mahoosive great wooden spoon to stir, all fine and dandy.

Except it wouldn't set! And I was doing it after I finished work and after I'd eaten, so no time to boil it up again *and* wait for it to cool enough to strain it and put it into the jars I'd so carefully sterilised. Do take the careful bit with a pinch of salt, but it was certainly Good Enough.

Anyway, on the evening of the next day, the last before I was due to travel 300 miles, I boiled it up again. I was much more enthusiastic about my definition of a rolling boil, and I thought to myself, I know, I'll reduce it a bit by boiling, that should help.

It helped so well, in fact, that I couldn't strain it to make blackberry jelly at all - it just sat there on the purpose-made strainer on the purpose-made stand, looking ridiculous. What saved me was that that amount of boiling meant that the blackberries themselves had disintegrated, and their texture is what I dislike about blackberry jam - so, with them gone, blackberry jam becomes an elixir! Especially since it was gathered with my own fair hands from countryside areas, or town parks at least 30 yards from a road.

What about the pan? Well, I didn't stir the jam enough when it was doing its determined boil, and I burned it. Certainly didn't have time to do anything about it before I left for my holibob, and since I came back, its literally been pushed to the back burner, gathering dust and other awful items very nicely, please and thankyou.

Today is my first day back at work, and even someone as bad at housework as me eventually has to do something with a burned pan. And this is the result of only five minutes work below:

The ordinary sticky stuff is cleaned off, and about half the burned stuff is scraped off with a knife - I started on it with wire wool, and realised that life is far too short for that, so I went in with the emergency equipment ...







So, the green reasons for not burning a pan:
- in extreme cases, you have to throw the dratted thing away. This is not green.
- you're deprived of the use of a fairly expensive piece of kit for quite a while, if you're anything like me. Inefficiency is not green either.
- you have to put a lot of energy into restoring something that shouldn't have been damaged in the first place, if you'd been, say, following a recipe carefully **whistles innocently**
- you've wasted not only your own energy, but you've wasted fuel (gas, electricity, from whatever source) as well.
- you've also wasted the food that got burned onto the pan - in this case, blackberries, sugar and lemon juice.
- you might affect the flavour of what you've managed to save! I haven't, thankfully, but I might have.

And truly, although I'm already in a "back to business" sort of mode, I wish everyone a healthy, wealthy and happy New Year.


PS - please, please, tell me I'm not alone in sabotaging my green efforts in this way .... anybody got any confessions they'd like to make?