Berry-Picking, Jam-Making

As summer seems to be zipping along at a very steady pace, I’m starting to catch subtle hints of autumn here & there…in the increased frequency of the hummingbirds at our feeder, in the slight change in daylight, in the chillier evenings, even something in the air at particular moments (although hard to define), and in my internal clock I suppose that makes me want to slow down a bit and pick up some unfinished knitting project from last winter (for some reason I can only knit when its cold out)…yet I’m still trying to cram in as much summer as I can and doing my best to complete some of my favorite summer traditions.

Unfortunately I missed the boat on my “strawberry picking/freezer jam making” ritual that I have engaged in over the past 2 summers, so I was happy that I was able to get in a little raspberry picking on the nearby creekside trails a week or so ago. From these raspberries, I decided I’d try making raspberry freezer jam to help replenish my dwindling stock of strawberry freezer jam.

In addition to freezer jam being scrumptious spread across toast, I also like to drizzle it upon vanilla ice cream, and a new favorite…to add a spoonful of sweetness to my fruit/yogurt smoothies in place of honey. After I made my first batch of strawberry freezer jam two summers ago (one of my new “acts of domesticity” after leaving my “corporate job”) and tasted how good homemade jam is (not to mention how really very simple it is to make freezer jam)…well, it’s become almost a necessity. There’s also something so rewarding and satisfying about picking your own berries and turning them into something that can fill up the fridge or have on hand to wrap up in fabric & ribbons for a sweet little hostess gift.

So…although I like the taste of strawberries slightly better than raspberries, and you need to use more sugar for raspberry jam, and you really should strain about half of the seeds (a somewhat tedious task), and it seems you need to pick lots more raspberries to get a batch of jam versus larger, plump strawberries, not to mention the tiny bugs that like to hang out inside the berry cavity so I had to go through them more carefully, requiring longer prep time than strawberries…it truly was just as rewarding and satisfying, perhaps even more so due to all the extra work!