content from the
CambrianTimes
October 2003.  Volume 13, Number 10
reprinted with permission. Copyright (c) 2003 Times Media, Inc.

Carolyn Norris makes blue ribbon jams, marmalades

Carolyn and Dennis Norris, smile as they display the techniques of making preserves, marmalades and jams. Note the eight ribbons on the stove. Carolyn now can claim the expert status that everyone else already knew she had.

Cambrian resident wins blue ribbons at Cal Expo and Santa Clara County Fair despite lack of fruit

By Carol Rosen
Editor

Schmuckers better move over because Carolyn Norris, who’s been putting up jams and marmalades for years, now has a .passel of blue ribbons to prove that she makes the best! It’s a fact, I know, because I’ve tasted them.

Carolyn, who’s a community activist and vice chair of the Cambrian Community Council, has been offering her opinions of developing jams and syrups to Village Harvest for the past couple of years. Village harvest is a harvesting-for-the-hungry organization that uses overly ripe fruit for the distribution process in order to raise funds to buy more harvesting equipment and supplies.

Carolyn has spent 40 years developing her experience in preserving, but felt she had no credentials to support the faith Village Harvest had shown in her. And even though she realized that everyone who tried the delicious preserved fruits—family, friends and neighbors—loved them, “I decided to surprise them and enter into competitions in hopes I could repay their faith in me.

So she and her husband and preserving partner, U.C. Master Gardener Dennis Norris developed a plan. “Dennis is the savory preserver, with neat pick­les and mixed peppers. I’m the sweet person who tackles and tickles fruit. Together we are quite a team. Both of us were raised in families that took preserving from the garden as a way of life,” she says.

Her first foray was with marmalade. “I’d done my first marmalades the previous year, and felt I had pretty well mastered the art. So I decided to try them out at the Santa Clara County Fair, Aug. 2. To my delight the Nagami kumquat (marmalade) received the Best of Class and the Eureka lemon earned a second place.”

However, Carolyn had a problem. She’d misjudged the amount of fruit she needed. “I had no Eureka lemons or kumquats to meet my Cal Expo commitment on Aug. 16. “But Carolyn’s neighbors came to her rescue. She’d shared her woes about the lemons with friend and neighbor Jan Carey. “She asked if I was going to be home that evening. I didn’t understand why until later when she knocked on my door and presented me with a dozen beautifully aromatic Eureka lemons from Pat Bristow’s tree.”

That gesture was so thoughtful, said Carolyn, that she got up the nerve to call her friends Jack and Nancy Campbell to see if they had any kumquats left they could donate. “Jack harvested and delivered them the following day.”

By that time, Carolyn and Dennis had a lot of work to do. They made the jams, preserves and marmalades and went off to Sacramento. “By the time Dennis and I sat through five hours of open judging of over 450 statewide entries, my reasons for competing had grown immense­ly to include the entire neighbor­hood of Cambrian Park!”

Carolyn didn’t have high hopes either. She entered two marmalades and two reduced sugar jams. Most fair connois­seurs explained to her that reduced sugar entries don’t place well. In addition, her entry num­bers were high, meaning that she would be one of the last to be judged. ‘Another rule, ‘never be the last jar’ kept floating through my head,” she said.

Carolyn says she held her breath through the first 100 jars and didn’t exhale until Judge Linda Amendt, an award winning preserver herself and author of Blue Ribbon Preserves noted a “lovely reduced sugar jam” she had just tasted. She was holding her breath again when Judge Iris Dimond, family and consumer science educator, tast­ed Carolyn’s reduced sugar olallieberry jam, grabbed the microphone and said, ‘After tasting so many jars so rapidly, it is wonderful to end the day with this excellent tart olallieberry jam.”

Needless to say, Carolyn went home with four First Place ribbons. But she claims she didn’t do it alone. “Cambrian, Village Harvest and I had been awarded four first place ribbons out of four entries along with some wonderful comments that we can all be proud of.”