Last Words

Try Lynda's jam cocktail strategy if it's time to do some spring cleaning.

Spring cleaning cocktails

Spring cleaning. Surely one of the most incompatible word pairings in the English language. In spring, there are a thousand things I'd rather do than don a pair of rubber gloves and earnestly scrub, sweep, mop, polish, dust, or declutter a winter's worth of domestic detritus.

There are codling moth traps to hang in apple trees, fizzing with a relay team of honeybees passing the baton from one breaking blossom bud to the next. There are freesias and bluebells to pick by the basketful and sprouting spuds to plant. There are dahlias to dig in and sweet peas to sow. There are mesclun seeds to scatter in slumbering salad beds. There's 100m of hornbeam hedging in desperate need of a short-back-and-sides trim.

I prefer to take my cleaning cues from the original heroine of humorous housewifery, American syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996). Erma's theory on housework: if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?

You shouldn't, unless your refrigerator is a portal to a world of health and safety hazards. For example, when I opened my fridge door today, three eggs and a mummified glob of what I'm hoping was once gooey goat's cheese fell out and made an accidental omelette on the floor.

There's a whole other realm on top of the fridge, so you're at equal risk of being hit by something falling off it as out of it. It's where to look for loose change, souvenir magnets, flat AA batteries, bills to pay, prescription medications, padlocks, an assortment of Allen keys, playing cards, spare phone chargers, random nuts, bolts, screws, and picture hooks.

I'd die of shame before publishing photographic evidence of the Jengastacked shambles inside my fridge. Instead, I compiled a stocktake of its comestible contents.

Chutneys: tamarind, eggplant, tomato, plum.

Mustards: wholegrain, Colman's Hot English, Dijon, lime-green French tarragon (Edmond Fallot Moutarde verte à l'estragon, the stuff of the savoury gods, to be precise).

Meat: bacon, beef mince, chicken breast, chorizo sausages, pork chops.

Vegetables: broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cucumber, rocket salad, a soggy plasticwrapped Iceberg lettuce.

Sauces: aioli, Culley's special burger sauce, tartare, tomato.

Pickles: marinated artichokes, ginger, jalapeños, onions.

Cheeses: brie, chèvre, colby, feta, halloumi, grana padano, mozzarella, Mooody Cow Elladale, parmesan.

Seriously, who needs nine types of cheese? That would be me, the same woman whose husband opens a new jar of jam every time he makes toast. How else to explain the dozen half-eaten jars of homemade jam at the back of the fridge?

I make so much jam that I wrote a book on it. I make every flavour you can think of, and quite a few – damson and licorice, peach and lemon verbena, nectarine and amaretto – that you've probably never thought of.

My children only eat one flavour, an invention I call ‘jumbleberry' (jam-setting sugar and whatever fresh and frozen berries I can find). I'm pretty sure my husband only eats one – damson plum – which means I'm to blame for all the others. I believe there's very little in life that can't be improved with a spoonful of sugar and fruit. Add a dollop of redcurrant jelly to the roasting dish just before making gravy, glaze pastry shells with apricot jam, stir marmalade into mulled wine, caramelise onions with quince jelly, eat sharp cheese with tart plum jam.

But best of all, drink the dregs! Scrape spoonfuls of leftover jam into a cocktail shaker for mint jelly juleps, lime marmalade mojitos, peach jam bellinis, cranberry jelly cosmopolitans, raspberry jam daiquiris, and Seville orange marmalade mai tais.

Spring-cleaning my fridge is suddenly a rather appetising concept. And it makes room to cool the champagne for another

■ round of mandarin jam mimosas.

I'd die of shame before publishing photographic evidence.