Freezer Jam!

As you may or may not know, we just got home last night after spending our Easter weekend in Salt Lake with some of our family. It was heavenly. But I'm not blogging about that just yet. I will! Just not yet.

On our way out of town we stopped in to a Wal-Mart to pick up some lunch stuff and I noticed they had 1 lb. containers of fresh strawberries for .88 each. I bought 4 and have since been wishing I'd gotten a couple more. They're $1.50 here (which really isn't bad at all), but I'm hoping they'll go down just a little more soon.

Anyway, I decided to take my 4 lbs. of strawberries and try making some freezer jam. Never done it, but how hard could it be?

Here's my cast of characters.
plain white sugar (or you can use granular Splenda)
freezer safe containers
4 lbs. fresh strawberries (I also used 2 cans of peaches)
food processor
2 pouches of pectin (I used the "no cook" kind for jams and jellies)
various other implements like a paring knife, measuring cup, wooden spoon, and bowls

Hull the strawberries...

...then cut them into smaller chunks so they'll fit into the food processor better.



Puree to the consistency you like. Repeat about 800 times if your food processor is microscopic like mine.

Have a cute and eager 3-year-old help with this part. :)



I was just following the package instructions, so after mixing 4 cups of sugar and 1 pouch of pectin together, you add 4 cups of your crushed fruit and mix for 3 minutes. I used 3 cups of strawberries and 1 cup of peaches.

Hakan took over the camera for a bit. Here's what I heard in my head when I saw this picture.
"Hi Double Chin. Your baby is one year old- the last of that pregnancy weight is NOT coming off on its own. Time to go on a diet, lady."

He got a nice stirring shot, huh?

And in less than an hour we had 8 containers of strawberry peach jam, ready for the freezer. That lonely little guy on the end was left over strawberries that got replaced by peaches in my jam.

The pectin package says this will keep for about 3 weeks in the fridge and up to a year in the freezer.

I really hope this stuff turns out. When I put it in the freezer it was still pretty runny.
Oh, well.
If it's too runny to put on bread I'll just have to eat it with a spoon. :)