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.
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4 comments:
yay! i am so glad you are canning now.. but why do you have to live so far away so we can't do it together?? all i am saying is when the apocalypse comes, we will be ready, with enough preserved goodies to last a lifetime. :)
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
sounds soooo good -
i never liked orange marmalade, but grapefruit sounds pretty tasty.
kingsolver suggests overbuying (everything) at farmers' markets during the summer and canning what you can't eat right away. the two of you might be inspiring enough to make me try canning for the first time this summer.
I wanna have more. I need to just make some. I still have all those strawberries I froze. do you think that will work just as well?
ooohh!!! I'm so inspired! I want to try your Nana's recipe. Thanks for the image. I'll let you know how it turns out.
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