In the unbearable Okanagan heat I’ve been keeping myself happily occupied in an air-conditioned house by making tons of jam.  I made some very attractive-looking jam from the yellow and red variety of cherries called Rainier.  Last Wednesday I went to the Farmer’s Market and got some very ripe apricots.  I made deep orange-coloured, tart-tasting jam that is to die for, especially in mid-winter.

Here’s the secret to keeping jam tasting as fresh as the day it was made.  You must store it in the freezer.  Don’t make icky freezer jam, but make regular, old cooked ‘Certo jam’.  Then when cooled, put the jars into the freezer.  When you thaw one you’ll swear it was just made that day.

I also found a wonderful solution to those pesky single servings of food that are leftover from time to time.  For example, I’ll make four chicken breasts and then Nicky decides not to come home for dinner.  In our house, once something has been prepared for a meal and then not eaten, it is poison.  So in the past I would find myself throwing perfectly good food into the garbage.

Now, however, I freeze everything, and then every couple of weeks Luke’s friend Ryan comes and picks it up!  At this rate, Ryan owes me I don’t know how many hours of hard labour in my garden.  He thinks I’m doing him a favour by giving him homemade food, and yet I am benefitting from the guilt-free garbage disposal and free help.  In my defense I’d have to say he’s the one who said he’d work for food.

Speaking of food fetishes, Nicky is into this silly whey thing.  He buys gigantic vats of vile-smelling powder which he mixes into mammoth-sized mugs of milk.  Thanks to this stupid new fixation, we go through at least 16 litres of milk a week.  He’s also at the gym like a lunatic, pumping iron, and I’ve noticed that he is indeed quite muscular.

Sadly, though, he’s muscular and lean, and not fat, which is irksome.  He drinks the whey powder and milk at least three times a day, and then eats platters of food that should turn him into Perez Hilton.  The other night he had two fully loaded hamburgers with a gigantic helping of potato salad and several cobs of corn on the side.

If only I could eat like that!  A nice woman at the gym bummed us out horribly the other day.  She said she’d accompanied her husband to the diabetic clinic where she learned that weight control is 90% diet and 10% exercise.  We all wondered aloud what the hell we were doing busting our glutes at the gym day after day.

But then I can only imagine the nightmare of not going to the gym, plus having no willpower in the dead of winter.  The apricot jam will be calling, and some nice warm buttered toast slathered in jam will just hit the spot perfectly.  Unchecked, Kirsie Alley the Second would emerge, and that’s definitely not good.