Strawberry Jammin'

Okay, I didn't just look at the strawberries Wednesday--I bought one of those brimming buckets of beautiful red berries. Bonus! I also received a half bucket from the Randle Farm vegetable share I'm sharing with someone. Forget planting Sunday; I had berries to play with!

I decided my first order of the day was to make strawberry jam. If you look in our refrigerator, you will see zero jars of commercial jam or jelly, only a jar of fig preserves my friend's mother made. I switched to local honey years ago to avoid high fructose corn syrup. That can be a post for another day. Googling "making strawberry jam" yielded many results, but they basically seem to have the same steps: hull and chop 6 cups of red berries, mash berries, cook with 1/4 cup sugar and 1 package pectin (if you use pectin; I did because I wanted to be sure it was of jam consistency), bring to a boil and boil 5 to 10 minutes before adding the remaining sugar and 1/3 cup lemon juice (I used fresh-squeezed), bring to a boil once more and boil 1 minute. Pour your jam into sterilized jars and seal before putting into a hot water bath.

This being my first time making jam, I didn't quite have the right equipment set up. I tried to use the pressure canner to give my 8 pints of jam a hot water bath, but the water wouldn't go 2 inches above the lids as suggested. A bit of frantic searching, which included throwing things out of a cupboard trying to find "the" item, which ended up not working. At this point the husband and the nervous dog left for a long walk. Finally, I transferred the hot water to a pasta pot and gave the jars a 5-minute+ hot water bath. A chorus of "pop, whop, pop" followed as the lids sealed.

Voila!

Family dinner was less than 2 hours away, and the planned dessert--fresh, homemade strawberry ice cream--hadn't even been started. Nor had the chickens. Both needed seasoning and one needed to be butterflied, so I started the ice cream first: Perfect No-Cook Strawberry Ice Cream from Epicurious.com. We ate at 4:30 instead of 4, and the ice cream was still quite soft, but everything was yummy! The girls went home with two jars of jam each, and we still had four to put up in the cupboard. All in day's work!