The Best Laid Plans.......

Are always subject to change. Not five minutes after my previous post talking about relaxing in the yard with my knitting, Matt came out and said that he and Becca had just picked up two flats of freshly picked strawberries, and did I want to make jam with them........ silly question!

With their help with the cleaning and hulling and stirring and all the other stuff needed for jam making, we now have 15 of the 500ml jars of strawberry jam.  Ten of them are reduced sugar, and the other five are full sugar. I recently purchased the Realfruit Pectin from amazon, and so far I like it. I kinda wish the jars of pectin were bigger though. I got the 10 jars of low sugar from the one jar of pectin, but there wasn't enough left to do another full batch out of it. There is talk of doing more jam tomorrow, which will pretty much wipe out the rest of the pectin I ordered. Guess I'll have to get more.

I love productive days......

The jam making is done. I started at about one o'clock this afternoon, and took the last of the jars out of the water bath canner at 7:15 tonight. Whew!!! The final tally.......

5 1/2 jars of peach marmalade


 
5 1/2 jars peach jam, 9 jars raspberry apple marmalade and 7 1/2 jars of Strawberry lemon jam.


 
I haven't done this in a large number of years.  I'd forgotten how much I enjoy looking at the final product. And tasting it is even better. I find a lot of the store bought jams over sweet, so I rally like the combinations that have the lemon or the marmalade in them. However, the other thing I'd forgotten is how much standing and chopping and especially stirring, there is involved in these. I recruited Scott to do the stirring on the last batch. He came so willingly to help...... he's such a sweetie, I think I'll keep him. LOL!!
The rest of this day is going to be spent feet up, with some quiet needle work in the recliner chair. Tomorrow, it's back to work on quilts.

Today I'm making jam

I have wanted to get back into making jams and stuff for quite a while. What usually stopped me was the heat in the kitchen when strawberries and raspberries are usually in season in June and July. However, one of the growers near us has ever bearing berries, that produce crops in September. It is lovely and cool outside, so I can heat up the kitchen, and open the windows to let the heat and the steam out.
So, later on today, these berries will be lovely jars of jam.