Mango Jam?

I made mango jam today. Why? 5 reasons:
1. procrastination (i'm supposed to be writing another grant)
2. yellow mango season is almost over (and they are delicious, oh, and very healthy too)
3. zella adams (neighbor on the cape) was discussing canning tomatoes
4. a food blog i sometimes peruse just made cherry jam
5. did i mention procrastination?

So here's what I did:
- purchased 28 yellow mangoes from the local fruit stand (3 for $1)
- purchased 9 lemons from said fruit stand (3 for $1)
- placed mason jars into large pot, added water, and started heating to boil them for sterilization (i saved jars from tomato sauce, salsa, and mustard)
- removed labels from fruit
- zested 2 lemons and threw zest into pot
- reamed 5 lemons and threw juices into pot
- peeled mangoes (saving peels for compost)
- excised meat from mangoes (cutting myself only twice, and saved pits for compost)
- cut mango pieces smaller (they might be stringy otherwise?) and placed them into the pot
- started boiling for a few minutes until the ingredients were mushy
- measured mango mush (80ounces!) and placed in a smaller non-stick pot
- the recipe i had been following suggested adding 3/4 sugar to the quantity of fruit mush, but their recipe was for sour cherries. Because the mangoes are so sweet already, I strayed from their recipe and added only 32oz of sugar. (I worried that this may have been too much sugar, but then I wondered if the jam would solidify otherwise?)
- started boiling the mango mush
- the recipe suggested placing a plate into the freezer and after about 10minutes of boiling, dripping a little mush onto the frozen plate, refreezing for 1min, then checking to see if the jam was jam-like. if not, then the mush was to be boiled longer. i did this for maybe 25min, until I felt satisfied that the mango mush might be jamlike.
- opened the lid of the boiling jars and realized that since some jars still had their labels on, the labels had disintegrated during boiling and created a mess on/in the jars. so i dumped the boiling water (ack!), cleaned the bottles with soap, and reboiled them (bummer!)
- boiled the mango mush another 10min or so until the bottles were boiling (about 70-75 ounces total)
- then removed the bottles with tongs, dumped the water, and filled them as much as possible with mango mush
- after lidding the jars, i turned the bottles upside-down a few seconds to heat the lid and hopefully sterilize everything again.