Jam happened over a month ago, right after I went strawberry picking with my awesome friend Beth, and I forgot to post about it. I had tons of fun following Darina Allen's old fashioned recipe for strawberry jam!
I used to make grape jelly with my gram, and I was really weirded out by pectin. I have always wondered since then whether pectin is really necessary for jam and jelly making. Following Darina Allen's recipe, I used a little bit of lemon juice and a little bit of sugar, and my jam gelled perfectly. And it was amazingly easy!
I remember spending ridiculous, long, hot days in my gram's kitchen with grape juice EVERYWHERE. The hardest work I did, other than picking the strawberries, was washing and hulling them. I did kind of get strawberry juice all over my kitchen during that process. But then I just mixed the strawberries with some lemon juice and sugar (about half what the recipe called for, because I hate sweet jam), cooked and mashed it a bit, and let it sit overnight. The next morning, I cooked the jam up for about 2 hours, tested it unsuccessfully to see if it would gel, and, because I was short on time, put it up in jars even though it didn't seem ready. A few days later, I opened the first jar, and it was perfect. It turns out I don't really love strawberry jam that much, but this is nice and tart and strawberry-y, and is really great on toast with butter or in a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
Note: if you butter a peanut butter and jam sandwich, it's amazing. I learned that from my dad.
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