Jamalamadingdong

The other day I was reading my friend Rene's great blog, Cottage and Vine where she did a post about making fresh strawberry preserves.  My son Bugs has been asking me to make some strawberry jam for the last several years and Rene's post inspired me to get crackin!

My mother always made several types of jam, including Strawberry Freezer Jam, each year, and it was a real treat for my kids whenever they had a sleepover to wake up to toast or english muffins with yummy strawberry jam slathered on top!  It has been a few years since I've made some, but the word on the street was that it was a very good year for strawberries, so I decided it was time to go pick a few!  

Strawberries, peaches, and grapes are just a few of the fruits grown that are often doused with herbicides and insecticides so I only buy organic varieties, which isn't easy in the rural area where I live.  But to my delight, many farmers told me that they didn't need to spray anything on this year's crop of strawberries and that was music to my ears!

I was supposed to go pick strawberries with my sister and niece on the day I hurt my back, so needless to say that didn't happen, but over the weekend I convinced Mr. Tide to take me for a short ride to one of our local Mennonite farms to see if we could find some.  Not only did we find strawberries (9 quarts to be exact) but we also came home with a truckload of flowers too!  So it was a very good day, even if I was made to walk very slowly or stay in the Durango by a certain handsome fellow!

Mr. Tide cut up all of the strawberries that evening and we've been munching on them morning noon and night ever since.  But today I wanted to get going on the jam so that the berries wouldn't over ripen, which makes for bad freezer jam!

If you've never made strawberry freezer jam, or any freezer jam for that matter, you really should, it's so easy and would be a great afternoon activity for you and your children if you still have little ones at home.  All you really need are some berries, a few Tablespoons of lemon juice, LOTS of sugar, some pectin ( I use Certo because it's what my mother and grandmother used), and some clean Ball Canning Jars and lids!

The recipe is even included in the box and it tells you how to make all sorts of jams and jellies...yum!

I like to use fresh lemon juice and I recently brought home that beautiful little glass juicer from my parent's house.  It worked like a champ after all of these years...and I just love the way it looks too!

I also used this lovely turquoise Pyrex bowl that belonged to my mother and my grandmother before her!  See what I mean about using lots of sugar?!  I think this really should be called strawberry hummingbird food, not strawberry freezer jam!

After a bit of berry mushing (done slowly so as not to re-injure my back), and lots of stirring, I now have 10 yummy jam filled jars!  Rene used much cuter labels than I did!  I bought these a few months ago knowing I would eventually be making jam, but her jar labels had a picture of her house on them...too cool!

Tomorrow, if I'm able to drive and Mr. Tide will let me, I plan to deliver a few of these jars filled with sweet strawberry goodness to some friends and neighbors!  Then when it's the dead of winter with not a strawberry in sight, they too can have a cup of tea and a biscuit with jam!