And no, for those of you wondering - I HAVE NOT been cleaning my house! Nor have I suddenly become uber organized or neat in my household. HA! That will probably never happen, but if you're a close friend you're really not surprised now, are you?
I'd rather spend time with my kids and doing little projects here and there.
So today in my domestic glory I baked fresh bread in my breadmaker - my favorite recipe yet - Milk Bread - I'll post the recipe later if I think of it.
I also washed and hung out my diapers on the line - although I had to put them in the dryer eventually because it started to rain.
I tidied my kitchen and living room (see? i cleaned, kind of)
And then I made 3 different batches of JAM!
It was about 4 or 5 years ago when I first attempted to make homemade jam. I started with strawberry and blueberry - both wild successes.
The year I had Madeleine I believe I made strawberry and maybe blueberry but Mommy Brain is keeping me from really remembering.
Last summer I made a triple batch of Peach jam, which is Mike's absolute favorite.
I knew it was time to start working on more Peach jam because I gave my last full pint to my dad for Father's Day - because he covets it as well.
Barely a tablespoon is left in our jar in the fridge and that's a bad thing. Now I gave a lot of it away last year, but the majority of it was tucked away in our pantry - and that's a LOT of peach jam.
I started out today planning to make blueberry jam. It's not my absolute favorite (i am a strawberry girl :) but I bought 2 pints of blueberries last week and they were on the tart side - so it's into jam they go!
Six half-pints of blueberry jam later I hear the phone ring and it's my girlfriend Rebecca L. who lives down the road. She recently blessed me with a bag of okra and a few figs from her tree in the backyard. Well she was calling to say she had some figs for me!
I love this fruit - they're so sweet and yummy. It's great to pick them straight off the tree and just pop them in your mouth!
Plus they're beautiful! This picture really doesn't do the color justice, though. The middle is a bright pink - not dull brown like in the picture...
I found a recipe for mock strawberry jam - using figs - so I decided to try that out. It uses figs, strawberry jello and sugar. Mashed figs are nasty looking, but the end result is so good!
It sure smelled yummy while it was cooking!
Last was a single batch of peach jam. I bought two kinds of peaches today. The local grocery had Southern peaches for 79 cents a pound, but they were rock hard. I bought a bunch anyways and stuck them in brown bags - hoping they'll ripen...
They also had these dark red peaches from california. I'm not sure what variety they were, but the skins were barely fuzzy. I can tell you one thing, they were NOT freestone peaches (where the pit pulls away from the flesh). I "mashed" these by hand - trying to get the darn pits out!
I ended up putting some of the huge chunks in the food processer, but not that much of it. I forget each time that it really cooks down the chunks, so next time I'm gong to leave more chunks.
For a moment I was scared that the concoction was going to boil over the pot, but it stayed at that level for the most part. It was really foamy - I never use butter to cut down on foam, but I almost wished I would have this time. I scraped most of it out thankfully.
Here is my end result of all the hard work canning today.
I'm including the pickles I made last week, too :)
7 assorted size jars of fig preserves
6 half pints of blueberry jam (2 missing from pic)
3 pints, 3 half-pints and 1 sample jar of Peach
whew! I'm ready to go to bed now!
No comments:
Post a Comment