And I hope you like jamming too.

Here you see some of the products of my and M.'s day of labour (with support from another friend, A.; this is also my entry for In The Bag: September which is being hosted by Real Epicurean). We bought about 15 lbs of organic strawberries from an organic farm down the coast toward Santa Cruz and then, using this recipe from the Martha Stewart Living website, we washed, cleaned, hulled, cut and cooked them all up with about 8 and a half pounds of sugar.



Here are the strawberries, washed, hulled and macerating in my stoneware canning pot. We had to split them into two batches of eight and seven pounds each because I didn't have big enough pots, or enough room on the stove to make the jam and can it.

The ratio was 8 pounds of strawberries to 10 pounds cups of sugar. The second, 7 pound batch got about 8 and a half pounds cups of sugar. (Gah! I was tired when I wrote this!)



Lovely, lovely processing jam! Isn't it pretty? I turned up the heat in this shot just to catch the boiling effect and then the lens got all pink and steamed up. Above you can see the jam cooking down. It took about an hour, and it's all very nerve-wracking trying to figure out when it's ready.

In the end we skipped the candy thermometer and used the wrinkle test (nicely represented here, at a site called DK Images) to tell when it was done. I still think that our jam is a little runny. But that's fine. We're not competing with anyone here.

Here's where it all began:


Shame on me, I can't remember the name of the farm where we bought the produce, but I'm waiting for M. to call me back to see if she remembers. It's about 25 miles north of Santa Cruz on Pacific Coast Highway. [Update! M. remembers that we bought the strawberries at a small farm called Pie Ranch. Pie Ranch is a sustainable agriculture project, which hosts educational programs for city youth, community events like pie bake-offs and dances, and generally aims to preserve the ecological integrity of coastal farmland. They have tons of other produce like the eggplant and peppers seen below.]


Can't wait to see what we find at the farmer's market on Wednesday; pears are coming into season and T. is hoping to make pear liqueur sometime before Christmas.