Jam!

As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't been updated in nearly a week. That's because I've been in Olympia, visiting family and friends. I had scheduled my time fairly close, and set aside Sunday to spend time with my mom. Well, today we made Raspberry Jam.

If you've never had home-made jam of any kind, you might assume it's just about as much better then store bought as anything else is when made fresh, at home, with fresh supplies. But store bought jam does not come close to fresh, still hot jam on fresh, home-made bread. Starting the jam was slightly delayed, due to the presence of kittens. They've born of a feral cat, and just under 3 months old. And of course, because they're kittens, they're adorable.

Once we got that out of the way, we got straight to making the jam. 8.5 cups of sugar, 6 pints of berries. Crush the berries in a BIG pot until you have exactly 6 cups of crushed berries, then start heating them. Once you start heating them, mix an entire package of pectin into the berries. You have to keep stirring it the entire time unless you want it to burn. The steam coming off the crushed fruit is rather scalding, and the splatters can burn you. When stirring and heating, the berry mixture will look like this.

The rolling boil will be more energetic, though, looking more like this.


Once you get the jam looking like this, it's time to pour the sugar in. Then bring it back to a rolling boil, like you see above. Keep it there for exactly 4 minutes, then pull it off and start pouring your jam into your jars. It's important to fully sterilize the jars beforehand, as well as make sure they're dried so the moisture doesn't prevent a good seal from forming. We put ours in the dish washer, then dried the necks with clean cloths. Then, taking a ladle, the jam should be scooped into the jars. Wipe the rims to make sure they're clean, then put the lids on them. Here's the jam being ladled into a jar;

And finally, a picture of what it looked like when we were all finished! Fresh, hot jam is truly amazing :D