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J is for Jam


Strawberries are in season in Texas. We bought a bunch. The kids have been loving them. The best strawberries are fresh from our garden, but we only get a handful of those at a time. They are a perfect before bed snack. For recipes that involve lots sugar and plenty of cooking time we use store bought strawberries. Julie has been hopping around the house saying "strawberries" for days. She also has utterly refused to wear clothes. She screams and shouts and kicks and thrashes while I get her dressed and then immediately removes all of her clothing as soon as she can. I've decided this is not a battle I'm willing to fight, so she spends most of the day in just a diaper. (I am willing to fight with her to keep a diaper on. I hate cleaning the carpet.) But when I said it was time to get out the strawberries and make jam she ran into the kitchen, grabbed her apron, and said "Put it on Mom." I did not make her ask twice.

In addition to convincing Julie to get dressed, the jam turned out to be one of our more successful projects. Strawberries can be adequately sliced (or mangled) by a child with a butter knife, there are only three ingredients, and only two of those need to be measured. With a long enough spoon, Spencer could easily avoid being splattered with hot jam while stirring. I was a little nervous about him filling the jars, but I should have had more confidence in his abilities. He did a lovely job. I'm a fan of the little 4 once jars because I like miniature desserts and because when the kids make their own peanut butter sandwiches they will use an entire jar of jam no matter it's size. -L





Strawberry Jam was a perfect dessert for this week.  No eggs, and he got to use the masher.

It's not quite berry season here in Boston, so we opted for frozen berries.  Isaac was disappointed when he tried to snitch a strawberry and couldn't bite into it.  We just made a small batch and since we love jam we didn't bother to process it (unprocessed jam should last about 2 weeks in the fridge). And of course homemade jam needs homemade carbs so we baked a batch of biscuits.  -H




Printable recipe here
Processing chart here

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