Summer evenings

So for the past month and half, I've been spending my evenings at the new dog park down the street from my house. The county is relandscaping the Mother Matilda Beasley Park on E. Broad Street and they've graciously included a fenced in dog area. It's fantastic. An added benefit is that I've been meeting a lot of neighbors and making some new pals. Here's a photo of Ahab enjoying the park last night. It took him a month, but he finally decided to try out the pool.

Jammin'

A couple of weeks ago, I went strawberry picking with my pal Ashleigh outside Beaufort, S.C. at Dempsey Farms. I got a little carried away and came home with 10lbs of strawberries. So good but definitely more than I could eat before they would go bad. I figured that it was a good time to try making preserves and also figure out how to can. Making jam is the super easy part - it's essentially a cup of berries to a cup of sugar and some lemon juice, then boil it down for awhile til it's jam consistency. Learning to can wasn't really difficult, but it did require purchasing some supplies and jerry-rigging some things in my home kitchen. Here's a picture of all the jam that I made from that 10lbs of berries - plain ol' strawberry jam, strawberry/blackberry and strawberry/peach.

I've gotten so excited about the whole process that I decided to try out my nana's recipe for marmalade and made some grapefruit marmalade this past weekend. It's not quite as thick as I'd like but hopefully the pectin will set after a week. It's really really good though. I also included the recipe in case anyone else wanted to try it. Trying to decipher my nana's handwriting is challenging enough.