Homemade Strawberry Jam

Last weekend I ventured out to Sweet Berry Farm in Marble Falls. Through mid May (this was pretty much the last possible week) you can go there and pick your own strawberries. Starting about now they have blackberries. In October they will have pumpkins. I’m in!  So after an hour or so in the sun, two of us managed to fill a couple of boxes with ripe strawberries.

You may remember that two years ago I canned some peaches. Er, a lot of peaches. Even though I haven’t done any canning in a while, when my husband told me about a pick-your-own-strawberries place near Austin, I felt suddenly inspired. You see, there are few things in life I love more than strawberry jam. This started me thinking. Self, I said, what if you made your own jam? Would that not be awesome?

Picking the strawberries was just the first part. I took them home and watched a movie, chopping off the stems and the squishy bits. My hands ended up so red I thought they would never come clean. Strawberries also have a lot of citric acid, so I think I pickled my hands really well too. My fingers didn’t feel right for a while.

But eventually, I had altogether a gallon of strawberries, several boxes of low-sugar pectin, a whole lot of 1/4 pint and 1/2 pint jars, and some honey.  First, there was the mashing. Then there was the cooking. Four cups of strawberries, a cup of apple juice, a box of pectin and a cup of honey. Sterilize the jars.

Pour the jam into jars.  Clean up the jars. Process the jars. Set out to cool. Clean the equipment. Repeat 3 more times.

And in the end?  11 pints of jam, all of which set, and none of which is still liquid!  That’s pretty exciting. If some of it had not jelled, or something else catastrophic had occurred, I would have been very upset. It takes a while to pick and prepare a gallon of strawberries!

I tasted the jam tonight. It’s perhaps not as sweet as what you might buy in the store – strawberries are tart and sweet, and my jam really tastes like that. I didn’t add any processed sugar, only honey, so it doesn’t have that jell-o consistency of store-bought jam. It’s not quite preserves, not quite jam. It is very tasty, though, at least I think so.

Since it made way more than I imagined, I will be giving a few jars away. I can’t promise anyone a darn thing about it, nor vouch for every jar being the exactly the same. Still, if you’re a fan of strawberry jam, and you’d like some, let me know. You can probably have some!

Things to remember

So a friend of mine has a grandmother. And her grandmother crocheted a baby afghan for her great-great grandson, my friend’s grandson. Her grandson loved the blanket, and carried it with him. Everywhere. Until there were holes. Giant holes. Really giant holes.

The blanket was mended once, with a scrap brown yarn. Then the grandson put some new and larger holes in it. That’s where I came in, to reduce the number of holes and give it a third life. So on vacation, that was one of my projects, to fix and reinforce the blanket.

The blanket is a simple one, double crochet rows, made of Red Heart in red, white and bright blue. There are nicer yarns and fancier patterns, but as this blanket shows, neither is really that necessary. There are clearly other things that matter more when you’re the three-year-old whose blanket this is.

Closet + Windows + Bathroom = Wrap

In my house, the only closet is exactly on the opposite side of the house from the only bathroom, and there are four windows and two doors in between them. Let me say that having a robe for the windows and slippers for the cold floors has become a necessity since I moved in.

However, I dislike robes. Mine always seem to untie themselves. In front of a window.

I found the solution in Simple Sewing with a French Twist by Celine Dupuy. A bath wrap is not a new idea, of course. I’ve seen them in my mom’s Lillian Vernon catalogs and the Hammacher Shl-whatever magazines you always see on airplanes.

This one, however, has several features that those did not. It (1) used up a stash of blue terry cloth I bought for another project that I didn’t know what to do with, (2) fits me really well, because I made it, (3) has straps and 2 buttons, because I wanted them, (4) has elastic sewn to the fabric in places so the fabric in the band never bunches up and (5) is the length I wanted, longer than one I could buy.

Excellent. I love it when a plan comes together.

P.S. I’m trying to make, or “complete” one project a week. Erk. It’s hard when you don’t have many hours to devote to it!