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!

Smell-o-vision

If I could give you guys one thing, it would be the smell of sun-warmed strawberries on a summer day, fresh from the field.

Unfortunately, until technology catches up, you’ll have to use your imagination.

I’m pretty sure I had a clever title earlier

As these things go, however, it has vanished. I’m not even sure what I was going to post about. Seriously, if you people want to get something clever out of me, you should figure a way to get me to write posts while walking home after work. But right now it’s 10 pm, so my brain can only offer up the dregs from a long day of the usual daily fare.

It’s the daily routine that concerns me today. Life amazes me in its infinite variations on the unchanging daily routine. Today I woke, went to work, walked home, cooked and watched TV. Three years ago, when this blog started, I had the same daily pattern. Now I have the same job, same husband, but many things have changed in that unchanging routine, and I have changed along with them. It seems that life is a type of evolution, the constant incorporation of new ideas and knowledge into life, and the constant response to what we encounter.

Now for an apt aphorism: change is the only constant. I have often created change in my life when it was not otherwise forthcoming. I was an impatient young woman, and did not appreciate gradual evolution. When I wanted something to change, I wanted it to happen RIGHT NOW. I still struggle to appreciate/acknowledge incremental patterns of change. I suspect that, when I am older, I will conclude that gradual is a great deal more powerful than sudden change, no matter how dramatic it might be.

An example. Today I cooked zucchini-basil soup: I sauteed a mirepoix base, then stewed it with zucchini and vegetable broth. Finally I pureed it with fresh basil and silken tofu. We ate the soup with spicy kohlrabi and green garlic latkes with mint-yogurt sauce. Except for the tofu and yogurt, it was all vegan and all farm fare, down to fat little carrots from my MIL’s garden. Four years ago? I was likely to be found eating a BLT from a sandwich shop, and didn’t know what a mirepoix was. Why the change? Mostly, because my encounters with my own and others’ illnesses during the past four years inspired me to be conscious of how I treat myself. I know now that my body believes in tit for tat: it treats me as poorly as I treat it. And I figured, while I was at it, I might as well figure out how to make healthy = tasty.

Food is but one example. I still have a cat and dog, but not the same ones. Caring for my sick dog and cat through their long illnesses … I don’t even have words for that experience. I now live in a house half the size of the one I used to, and have about 40% less stuff. I have taken interesting trips and seen new places. Valued colleagues have come and gone. I defied Texas and chose to walk a lot of places now instead of driving. I think much differently about my crafting now and the place that making stuff has in my life. I have new skills, new ideas, and new confidence. I have learned more about myself.

The discipline of staying put is hard for me. I can be mercurial and unpredictable. On the other hand, assuming that life stagnates if you’re not on the move is just dumb. Although I still believe in forcing change to avoid habitual ruts, at nearly 35 I am starting to appreciate how the small things cause transformation as surely as tiny roots break apart huge rocks.

A note on photos: I am starting a small container garden. Plants, I think, are a great metaphor for incremental change. Take the last photo, for example, of roots I’m growing from an ivy I bought nearly 10 years ago. It joins an older sibling I started growing three years ago that is now taking over a windowsill.