Blog Entry
Posted by Loren Alldrin on May 21, 2011 to Family Life blog
Many hands make lots of jam!
(click any image to enlarge)
The Team
The ladies worked hard all day, but had a lot of fun in the process.
Canning With Many Hands
The smaller girls made quick work of cutting the tops off 10 flats of strawberries. The berry washers had a hard time keeping up!
Six of 10
Ten flats of strawberries is a lot of fruit, setting us back about $150.
Kristen Checks the Recipe
You can't be too careful...
70 Bottles of Jam on the Wall...
We ended up making 27 batches of jam, which filled 70 jars. That's a lot of jam. Thank goodness it tastes delicious!
Jam-induced Trauma
A broken jar split the trashbag, which caused this mess in the hall. It looked like a crime scene, so we had fun staging a jam overdose. Anneliese nearly gagged on the jam and laughed her way through the process.
We decided to tackle a "home economics" project and can a bunch of jam. Three families joined in the fun, which was about all our kitchen could handle. We rounded up jars, pectin, sugar and canners, then purchased 10 flats of strawberries. (The gal at the strawberry stand thought we were crazy.)
Everybody got involved, even the little kids who made quick work of cutting the tops off the strawberries. We fired up every burner we could to steam lids and boil jars of jam. We even used the burner on the side of our barbeque. It took most of the day to complete the jam, but it was well worth it. Nobody got hurt, and only one jar broke.
When we were done, we ended up with 70 16- and 32-ounce jars full of delicious strawberry jam. When we ran the numbers, we spent a little bit less than you would just buying jam off the shelf. But the numbers don't really matter--this was all about learning the process of canning. On that level, and many others, it was a complete success!
Lessons learned:
- Canning makes more sense in smaller quantities (even with five burners going the actual canning process was the bottleneck).
- Canning your own fruits or vegetables is the way to go, as you wouldn't have to purchase the stuff from someone else.
- Invite some friends to help. It's much more fun that way!
Enjoy the pictures.
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