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!

Baby fuzzy chicks

3. So I fundraised yesterday. The event was wildly successful, and screamingly well organized, and people seemed to like it and feel warm and fuzzy. We (the we of work) are glad. Glad that it went so well, glad that we encountered no Acts of God, glad that we can now collapse for a few moments into tired but happy heaps. We had an actual performance this year from an out-of-town guest, the inimitable Anna Deavere Smith. I’d watch a video of hers or two if you have a moment.

2. Also. I went to a nearby farm Saturday. There were chicks at the farm. Two hens. A rooster. But like many people, I’m a sucker for the fuzzy baby animals. There were also goats, and the beginnings of beautiful squash. Ah squash season, how I love thee. The farmer promised he is growing an African squash that is similar to, but better than, butternut squash. I do not believe this is possible, but I am intrigued by the possibility.

1.  I bought garlic scapes and a kohlrabi at the farm, neither of which I’m entirely sure what to do with. I think the kohlrabi will be turned into cakes with yogurt and mint sauce. I want to turn the scapes into pesto with walnuts. Jeff thinks they should be bread pudding. Perhaps there will need to be more scapes.

0. Surely there’s time for a nap now?

Act within local variable scope …

Nerd humor! Yeah, I totally stole that from a T-shirt at ThinkGeek that completely cracks me up. I might just have to have that shirt.

So it occurred to me that I said I’d report back on the local-shopping experiment that Jeff and I did back in May. I almost forgot about it. That should tell you something about how easily it went that I forgot I was even doing it. It turns out it was easy to do, and I really enjoyed shopping at more of the local places.

I kind of bailed out in the last week because there were a few things I needed to get like TP and pet food – and honestly, the basics can be pretty hard to get from local places. Locally owned shops specialize by necessity. I have spoken to a number of people who don’t shop locally or buy things that are local or handmade because of the price. In most cases, people say it has to be “something special” or unique in some way to justify the additional cost. Because of that, I’d imagine that for a local shopowner you have to specialize in some way or offer unique items to be able to make sales at all. The national chains buy in such quantity that local or independent shopkeepers cannot compete on prices.

The catch is, of course, where do you want your money to go? What do you want it to support?

The local Austin Independent Business Alliance has info on their site from a report that says that for every $100 an Austinite spends, $45 stays in the local economy if you shop locally, while only $13 stays if you purchase from a chain store. I support my local economy because honestly, it supports me. A strong local economy means more jobs and higher wages locally. A strong local economy means more is spent on charities like the one I work for. Let’s be pragmatic here: money leaving Austin doesn’t do me any good.

I also think that the dollar is a vote. Your money votes for you whenever you spend it – it sends signals about what you like, what you support and what you think. My votes go to supporting people working for themselves. I’d like to own my own business and work for myself one day, so I think it would be really hypocritical of me to not support the very type of businesses that I one day want to own. Hopefully, my dollars vote that I like local business, handmade items, crafting and food. The more votes for those things, the more they can thrive.

Finally, I like my landscape to be non-generic. I’ve lived in a variety of places across the United States and I did that because I wanted to see what places were like, what their individual cultures were about. And let me tell you, big box stores detract from a place’s personality. I guarantee to you that what I remember about Colorado was not Target, it was the huge and lovely summertime farmer’s market (OMG the garlic variety! the flowers! the tamales!). K-Mart didn’t make a huge impression on me in New York, but the sandwich shop down the road owned by 2 brothers from the Bronx did. I don’t have fond memories of the Wal-Mart in Massachuetts, but the local library actually had a cataloguing system I’d never seen before, and that’s memorable. Local businesses are part of a place’s culture, they’re part of what makes each place unique and interesting. Austin wouldn’t be Austin without its local businesses.

I probably spend a little more money shopping locally than I would otherwise. Short-term, I’m out more funds. But I think the extra few $$ is an investment that’s worth it because of the long-term benefits of my choice. I’ve invested in people I know, I’ve invested in the place I call home, and I’ve invested in my own industry and job security. And it wasn’t even hard to do. I hope my experiment will ultimately turn into a good habit.