"Dancing in Meadows of Strawberry Jam"

This entry will be a little different, as my husband is doing the cooking! Actually, we are calling it a team effort.

The day before the 4th of July, my son and I went strawberry picking again(http://kristinesoares.blogspot.com/2014/06/strawberry-fields-forever.html)! Because they were so good the first time, we need to get more before the picking season ended. This time we got over 6 pounds! We had a plan, a "jam plan" (Friends fanatics will know what I'm referring to).

I needed some help, as I've never canned anything before. Marc, however is pretty skilled at this. He's spent hours canning tomatoes, relish and sauce. Lucky for us, he had some time off and we spent our rainy 4th of July making bread and strawberry jam. And boy was it good.

Ingredients:

Roughly 6lbs of ripe strawberries hulled and washed
A little less than 3 cups of sugar
2 packets of Sure-Jell low/no sugar pectin
2 tbsp lemon juice

My "job" was to hull all of these babies and some of them were super tiny. Thankfully, Marc decided to buy us a strawberry huller which made it faster. It kind of looks like this one http://www.amazon.com/Fox-Run-5582-Strawberry-Huller/dp/B006CFQ33K/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1404676381&sr=8-5&keywords=strawberry+huller

Wash and dice the strawberries

In a large pot, cook them down until strawberries are very tender. Mash them up a little. If you want a smooth jam, just blend it with a immersion (stick) blender.

Add in your pectin

Then 1/4 cup of the sugar and bring the mixture to a rolling boil.

After the rolling boil, add remaining sugar and boil again for another minute. Take off the heat.  Big hint, taste as you go! You may or may not need all of the sugar listed. This jam is not nearly as sweet as some others (others would call for double the sugar then what we used), but taste before you add it all in. If the fruit is sweet enough on it's own, you can probably omit some sugar.

Prepare your jelly jars. First we wash them well with soap and water. I am a novice at this part, so follow along proper safety instructions (http://www.freshpreserving.com/getting-started).

Fill the jars, put on the lids and then they process in a water bath for ten minutes.

Take out and let cool. As they cool, the jam/jelly starts to set up nicely. This was the hard part, because all I wanted to do was try it on a piece of freshly made bread.

And then...it was time. Hands down, the BEST jam I've ever had.