Jammin'

Finally!! I've been meaning to write a post about making jam, but I've put it off because the batteries in our camera were caput and we kept forgetting to get new batteries. And, let's face it, what's a blog post without a few photos -- right? So, about three weeks late, but, better late than never!

The last weekend in June, Kevin and I decided to make a batch of homemade jam. Kevin had never tried it before and I haven't made jam in about three years or so, so we were both excited about it! We bought some jars, gathered all of our ingredients together and got started.

We decided to make strawberry rhubarb jam. Why? Because it's soooo good! At Easter, I made a strawberry rhubarb crumble that everyone raved about. It truly was delicious. I thought that, since that was so good, and jam is really pretty much a crumble or a cobbler without the topping, wouldn't strawberry rhubarb jam turn out just as delicious as the crumble? Of course it did! Here are a few pics of our first attempt at making jam together: Supplies ... Cooking the jam ... The finished product ... After we finished with the jam, Kevin looked at the finished product and said "All that work for seven jars of jam?!" Which, is true ... however, I did reason that these were fairly large jars of jam. If we'd made smaller jars, it would have looked like more =)

Of course, we couldn't really stop there. We were so inspired - and fruit was so plentiful (and CHEAP!) that we decided to make more jam the next weekend! We made more strawberry rhubarb (which we've determined will be our specialty!) as well as raspberry apricot and triple berry - which has strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. YUM! All told we made 36 jars of jam. After giving some away to family, our neighbors and our landlords, here's a pic of what we have left: Don't ya just love those cute little labels?