Strawberry Jam

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that last year I started making my own soup and joined a CSA. While I loved both of these, they created a problem. My freezer was overstuffed with soup and veggies. To remedy the situation, I got a pressure canner for Christmas!

I gave it a test run this weekend. If you are interested in making your own strawberry jam, know that because it is fruit, you actually don't need a pressure canner. A big pot in which you boil water would be fine. But I wanted to start on something easy, so strawberry jam it was.

First, you need some canning jars.



Then, you need a lot of strawberries.



Put the jars into the canner and start them simmering. Put the lids in a small saucepan and start them simmering. Remove the husks from the strawberries and mash them.



Add the pectin and put the strawberries in a large pot to boil them. Add tons of sugar and keep boiling. When it is done, you will something that looks like this (you may need to strain off some foam):



Now you are ready to fill the jars. Take out a jar one at a time. Fill it to the designated height, get rid of air bubbles, and wipe the threads and rim. Put the lid on and tighten with a screw band. Put the filled jar back in the canner and repeat until all jars are filled. This step is really where it helps to have special equipment if you are canning jam. But a kit with a jar lifter, funnel, etc is pretty cheap.

When all the jars are filled, get the water boiling and boil for the designated time.



Take out the jars and you are done! Well, hopefully I am done. In 24 hours I can check to see if the lid sealed.

Weekend roundup

It's been a busy weekend. Friday night we went to my sister's as my mom arrived and is staying there. I didn't tell them about our IF problems then b/c my sister actually threw together a last minute slightly late 2nd birthday party for my nephew and there were lots of people there. It was a good night.

Although I still can't escape IF discussion. During the night, my sister was telling a story about my BIL's cousin and his wife. We've never met this cousin before, but my sister is always mentioning them b/c she thinks we have a lot in common with them. After her story, she mentioned that they just adopted a baby b/c they couldn't have one on their own. On the way home, DH was like "yeah, we have in common with them then she knows."

Saturday we painted one wall of our kitchen red. The others are yellow and the red wall is the one you see from down the hall and it makes our long hallway look shorter, which is great. I decided a few months ago that if I can't have a baby when I want, at least I can have a pretty house. So each month after AF I'm going to paint some part of our house. And since we already had the paint from when we painted our fireplace the same color, it was a no-cost makeover! I'll post pictures once I get the kitchen back in order today.

Saturday night we bought tickets to a play. Now, I didn't know the topic of the play before we bought the tickets, I just read that it won the 2006 Pulitizer, so I figured it must be good. Turns out, the topic was about a couple that lost their 4 year old child. Yeah, just what we needed to hear about. I realize of course that as bad as seeing month after month of BFN is, losing your child is even worse, but still. And then to make it even worse, the second major plot point in the play was that the mother's irresponsible younger sister was pregnant! So it had all the feelings of sadness, jealousy, etc that I'm feeling now anyway. Despite the subject matter, I still enjoyed the play and the acting was superb. And I cried my eyes out, although the good news is that it was mostly feeling the actor's pain rather than my own. That was actually quite refreshing, as it turns out.