Freezer Jam

I am going to start a series of posts on preserving food. It is a great time and money saver and it is a lot healthier that buying canned goods.

Since it is getting to be strawberry season, we will start with freezer jams. They are very easy, not very time consuming, and inexpensive to make. One of the best things about freezer jam is, since the fruit isn't cooked, it taste more like fresh fruit than store bought jams. You can use it just like fresh fruit.

To make 5 cups (more or less) of home made freezer jam, you will need:

3 or 4 pint jars or 5 or 6 half pint jars, well washed or sterilized in the dishwasher
Lids and rings to fit the jars
4 cups (more or less) of ripe fruit, washed and crushed
4 cups of sugar (or the equivalent amount of Splenda, I guess) and
1 box of Sure-Jell or other boxed pectin

Since I have never made the non-sugar versions, you might want to look up the directions for the sugar free versions of the jam. Every box of the Sure-Jell has the recipes inside and I think they tell how to make the sugar free versions, I just haven't looked them up.

Crushing the fruit isn't as hard as it sounds. As you wash your berries, or other fruit of choice, remember to crush a little bit at a time. This will make it a lot easier to make sure that they are all crushed. You can use the back of a fork or if you have one, use a pastry fork. A pastry fork is what I use. If you have never seen one, it looks like a D shaped piece of metal with a grip on the flat side and 3 or 4 rounded cutting edges on the curved side. It is used to blend butter or shortening into flour. Get one, it is very useful.

After your fruit is crushed and it is very juicy in the bottom of your bowl, mix in the 4 cups of sugar. This has the added bonus of drawing even more juice out of the fruit and will make a much better jam. Let it set for about 10 minutes.

While you are letting your fruit set, get out a small sauce pan. Mix 3/4 cup of water and your powdered pectin over a medium low heat to dissolve. You have to keep stirring it or it will stick to the bottom of the pan but it will dissolve fairly quickly. Keep stirring until you get a good rolling boil. Then start timing it. The pectin needs to boil for at least a full minute but not more than 2.

Pour all of the pectin into the bowl of fruit. Stir all of this together for at least 3 minutes. You want to make sure that everything is very well mixed. You will notice that the liquid in the fruit is getting clearer and thicker. This is a good thing. The more juice in the jam, the better it will taste and the easier it will spread.

Now you are ready to fill your jars. Ideally, you would use a ladle and a filling ring( a funnel with a really big whole in the middle). If you don't have those things, you can just use a big spoon, but you have to be careful not to get jam all over the jars. Fill the jars to within an inch of the top. That is about at the point on the jars where the threads start or if you are using standard mouth jars, where the curve of the jar meets the thread. Using a damp rag, wipe off the top of the jar so that there isn't any food on the top. Put on a lid and tighten a ring around it. It needs to be secure but it don't have to be so tight it takes a pipe wrench to get it off.

Now you let your jam sit at room temperature until it jells up. You can tell by tilting the jar a little to see if it is still runny. If it is, let it set some more, up to 24 hours. If it isn't, put it in the freezer. It will last up to a year(if you don't eat it before then) in the freezer or 3 weeks open in the fridge.

Freezer Jam is a lot more than just something to make PB & J or to spread on toast in the morning. I have used it to spoon over angel food cake, ice cream, and even roasting meat. I used some raspberry jam to put between layers of a chocolate cake. That was really awesome.

Toadally fun weekend

We had friends down this weekend and we had a great time. This last weekend was our hometown festival "Toad Suck Daze" with street vendors, live music, and all of the roasted corn and "Gator on a stick" you care to purchase.

Us women bought a couple of 1/2 flats of strawberries from the back of a truck up on the highway and made jam before we left for the festivities. 14 jars of some of the best freezer jam you will ever put in your mouth out of $14 of berries. You just can't buy that kind of good in any store. Especially for a dollar a jar.

My husband kept the men occupied with genealogy. One of the men now has his pedigree back to William of Normandy(a couple of different ways actually) and the first king of Sweden. He spent the rest of the weekend trying to get us to bow to his royal highness.

The other family is stuck in North Carolina. He had participated in a genetic testing study to link families thru DNA. He found out that he was indeed related to George and Rachel, but William wasn't George's Daddy. Now he is stuck again. He was kind of green about the royalty in the house, but it was a good time.

My daughter didn't get to be here this weekend because of an orchestra trip to Dallas. She left early Friday morning and didn't get back until about 3pm Sunday afternoon. Everyone was still here so she at least got to visit for an hour or so before everyone left. She was sad that she missed Toad Suck Daze and the ShawBlades concert Saturday night, but she had a good time in Dallas too.

Feeding 13 people is always interesting. Stew and biscuits Friday night, waffles and bacon Saturday morning, ham(that I smoked on Friday afternoon) sandwiches for lunch, grilled burgers for dinner before the concert. Sunday I made a big breakfast of bacon( 2 lbs), sausage(1 lb), and ham(about a pound), scrambled eggs(19), toast(26), fried potatoes(3-4 pounds), gravy( almost a 1/2 gallon), and the rest of the biscuits from Friday night and jam(of course). We didn't really eat lunch since we had breakfast at noon but I fried chicken and made some frozen veggies for dinner.

The last of the guests were gone by 7:30 pm and the rest was just down time for us.

All in all, a very enjoyable weekend.