Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Strawberry Jam


This week for Family Home Evening (FHE) we decided to forgo our lesson and just have a nice family activity - making homemade strawberry freezer jam.

Jeremy grew up with homemade jam and has pushed us to keep this tradition in our family. We love the finished product and eat it year round as we store it in the freezer so it's fresh whenever we are ready for it.

I stopped at a local fruit stand and bought a whole flat of strawberries - they are $15/flat this year. Goodness! But you just can't beat a fresh picked strawberry from the field - they are so juicy and taste like summer!


Here we are prepping the berries. Can you see the 25 pound bag of sugar in the background?

This is the ingredient list. Notice the recipe requires almost twice as much sugar as fruit!


Jackson always loves to help too.



Even Jacob (a cousin) thought it looked like fun and had to get in on the action.


Daddy and Logan did a great job as they gradually stirred in the pectin.
Lizzie's job was to screw all the lids and rings onto the jars.

Daddy has the best steady hand for pouring the sticky jam into the jars.


Our finished product! I counted 22 cups of jam.

Trevor got the point of our "no lesson" FHE. Later last night he said to me,
"Mommy, I know why we didn't have a lesson tonight."
I said, "Why's that, Trevor?"
He said, "So we could have some fun family time together."
Ahhh. We are getting through to these kids after all!
We had just enough strawberries left over to have some strawberry shortcake for dessert. So, I whipped up a white cake mix and let it bake while we finished up canning our jam. FHE was good for the memories and the tastebuds! Mmmm....we love strawberry season!



3 comments:

Maree said...

MMMMmmmmmmmm........That sounds DELICIOUS!! Hmong berries are SO much better than the grocery store. We're lucky here--we have Carlsbad berries, and they're almost as good. Glad you've continued the tradition--Freezer jam ROCKS!!

award said...

I can tell you from first hand experience this ain't no toe jam. Its good stuff. Thanks for the sample.
Matt

Whittaker Woman said...

Love it. I would love the recipe. And did Maree just call them Hmong berries? Oh boy that's one way of putting it. Ha. Please email me the recipe! H