Monday, July 5, 2010

Strawberry Season


Strawberry season came early this year and we’ve been waiting for this season since winter. Eric and I don’t have a big strawberry patch, so we have to go to a nearby farm. The big strawberries filled our baskets within a couple hours and we continued to pick until our stomachs were full. We drove home with forty pounds of beautiful berries in the back seat.

Our goal was to make enough strawberry jam to last us twelve months. We already had lots of mason jars and lids from our wedding, but we just needed the pectin. Eric has dreams of making our own pectin from apples, but this year that dream just didn’t fit into our busy lives. After looking at a couple different types of pectin, we decided on POMONA’s UNIVERSAL PECTIN. The box cost $4.29, but we made about ten jars of jam out of it. This pectin was great because it only used ¾ cups of raw sugar per 4 cups of mashed strawberries. We also tried on batch of jam using honey instead of raw sugar (which turned out great!).

By the end of the week we made twenty-one jars of jam, one strawberry-cream pie, breakfast smoothies, strawberry sundaes, strawberry waffles, froze nine quarts of berries, and ended up with a very very messy kitchen.

-Moriah