Man, we’re in a JAM

Last night Jessie and Curt came over to borrow some baking soda for some banana bread they were making.  Curt said something about making some freezer jam the next day and I told him I wanted to learn how to make it.  He told me to come over and help him, but I had to work today.  Well, I got to work and it was really slow and I was all caught up on my work so I decided to use one of my two vacation days left (if I don’t use them, then I lose them by the end of the year).  I left work at 10:00 and headed over to Curt’s house.

You can’t really tell from this picture, but we had a TON of fruit.  Those were 3 BIG buckets FULL of fruit.  So, we got right to work.  At first it took a little bit, b/c we had to let the fruit and sugar sit for 10 min and then boil some pectin and water and add it to the mix and stir it for 3 minutes.  You can’t double the batches, but we got a system down to where we had about 3 batches going at once. 

Curt asked me if I was going to blog about this and I told him of course, so he put on his super cheesy smile.  What a crack up.  Anyways, we worked from 11:00 until about 1:30 and then we ran out of pectin and tupperware.  So, we ran to WalMart and bought some more.  By this time we were both starving, so we went to Market Street to get my favorite pasta ever…Penne Dolcelatta.  YUM!  After lunch, it was back to work.

We worked until about 4:00 and then ran out of pectin and tupperware AGAIN!  We had bought 12 boxes on our trip to WalMart, but had already used all of those.  So, Curt went to the store AGAIN while I stayed and worked.  By this time it was 5:00 so he said while he was out and about he would stop and get Autumn from daycare for me.  I don’t know if you can tell from all this tupperware, but we made a TON of jam!

I started collecting the boxes of pectin when we were about 1/3 of the way done, so this is only 2/3rd’s of the boxes we used!  There are 24 boxes there, so we did at least 30 batches of jam!  And we didn’t even use 3/4’s of one of those big buckets b/c it was too juicy and didn’t have enough fruit so the jam wasn’t setting up.

It was a lot of fun and so much easier than I thought it was going to be.  We made cherry, blueberry, blackberry, and red raspberry.  The jam is SO TASTY, but that’s b/c it has so much sugar and is basically just fruit flavored sugar.  But that didn’t stop me from taking home one container of each kind.

These are some flowers that Mary had sitting on the counter that she got from work.  These are my favorite flowers in the world and I used them in my wedding bouquet and at my wedding.  Even though that didn’t end well, hot pink Tiger Lily’s are still my favorite flower.  They are SO GORGEOUS, and it was fun to get to see them the whole day while making jam.  What a fun way to spend a vacation day!