Strawberries Galore!

Friday I overheard some ladies talking about a strawberry sale over at Marsh and decided I had to have some strawberries for making some jam.  The strawberries were not that great (to be expected since it's winter), but they were fine with enough sugar and cooked into jam.   Then Teresa texted me Saturday morning that Meijer was having an even better sale (10/$10) and I definitely wanted in on that deal.  So she got me 11 more pounds.  So in total I had 19 pounds of strawberries to process.  Since Coleson had ISTEP Monday morning, I let him have the rest of the day off from school.  And that meant we had time to make jam.  We started with the plucking.  Katie and Ethan were big helpers too.  They took care of handing berries to us.  And then they disposed of the stems we plucked.

I bought these new pluckers on Amazon a few weeks ago and was excited to try them out.  They're pretty awesome.  Usually after that many berries, my fingers would be sore from stem plucking, but not with this baby. 


Katie also doubled as the photographer so I got to be in some of the pictures.  She had a cold coming on so she didn't get to help too up close with the berries.  But she and Ethan did eat quite a lot of them. 


After the plucking and cleaning it was on to cooking the jam.  I started rotating batches on the stove- there were 6 batches in all-  while Katie and Ethan entertained Owen.  They did a pretty good job of it because he was just laughing like crazy at his silly siblings.

 

This is one CUTE baby!!!  Can you see his big smile under there?

When I went to get more sugar in the food storage room, I found that the sugar was hard as a rock.  I set Hunter to work breaking up the rocks.  You know, it's all about finding the right job for the right kid.  Hunter usually doesn't really care for helping in our projects- he loses interest and wanders off.  But this sugar job kept his attention and then some.  He spent more than an hour hunched over the bucket chopping.  It was one of his textile things- the grains of sugar had him mesmerized.   But by bedtime he had that entire 5 gallon bucket back to usual fine sugar.  And I'd kept him busy for all that time.  It was the right job for him.


Tuesday a snow storm blew in and we spent all of Tuesday afternoon snuggled at home making jam.  As the batches were coming off the stove and cooling the kids were SO excited to get some.  They were licking spoons and bowls.  I had to make sure everything was staying sterile that still needed to be.  Fresh jam is even better with fresh warm bread so I made 6 loaves of bread too. The bread is just a way to get the jam to your mouth.  My kids are funny that way.  Give them a pile of candy or the choice of homemade bread and jam- and 9 times out of 10 they'd pick the bread and jam.  I made an actual dinner Tuesday night, but shouldn't have bothered because everyone filled up on bread and jam.  But that's the reason I made it, because they love it so much.  Ethan was so worried about missing the jam that he didn't want to take his nap so he got his pillow and blanket and waited on the kitchen floor. 

All in all we made 15 pints of strawberry jam out of 5 batches (the 6th batch we ate out of the pan before it even made it to jars :).  It's been a yummy week.