The girls and I went and picked some strawberries on Monday afternoon and when Brian got home from work, the two of us canned 19 and three quarter half pints! We were finished canning and had all of the dishes cleaned by 8 pm! I'll admit I did a little prep work beforehand...washing and hulling the strawberries and getting everything laid out and ready to go. After 3 or 4 years of doing this, we must be perfecting our routine! I did do a couple things different...one was on purpose, one was not. I always felt that there wasn't enough rhubarb flavor to the jam, so after straining as much of it as I could (and seeing there was still quite a bit of it left in the food mill), I ended up putting the rest into a food processor and processing it. I probably won't do this again in the future, because I can taste some of the stringiness in the jam, which is the whole reason why I put it through the food mill to begin with...to get rid of the stringiness. The "not on purpose" thing I did was to use a two thirds measuring cup (instead of a one cup) to measure the amount of strawberries. I was in a hurry and took the largest one on the bottom of the stack, not realizing that my one cup measure was in the dishwasher! Oops! After tasting the completed jam, it definitely has more of a rhubarb taste, but I haven't decided if it's too much rhubarb or not. Hailey told me that "this is the best jam you've made, Mom." So maybe the combination ended up turning out right!
She did a great job (for only being two and a half) picking the "really red" ones.
We all liked this one, because we thought it looked like a heart.
As you can see, they didn't get very far into the picking before they were eating them, too! One for the basket, two for the mouth, right?
My thumb must have accidentally changed to a different setting before I took this picture, but I thought it looked neat.
Two four quart baskets full! I will say that the best time to go picking is on a cooler and overcast day. It was only 73 degrees and overcast when we were there and we were still sweating by the time we were done. A guy picking nearby us said, "They should be paying US to pick them! This is a full-time job!" :-)
Both of these bowls came from our strawberry garden. We've had a good turnout this season! I picked another half of a bowl this morning and there's still more left to ripen and pick. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough ripen at once in order to use them exclusively in the jam.
Here are all of our strawberries washed and hulled, ready to use in the jam.
We made a triple batch this year and used about 3 quarts of strawberries and 10 pounds of rhubarb.
We ended up with 19 and three-quarter half-pints. Only one jar didn't seal...the first time I've ever had one that didn't seal.
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