Raspberry Jam

Last week, Kevin's parents picked us 30 pints of raspberries from his Aunt Linda's farm. I cannot begin to tell you how excited we all were about this! We love raspberries in this house. In fact, Nora sat down and ate an entire pint herself immediately.

I know you only counted 29 pints. Remember what I just told you about Nora?

We ate many, many fresh raspberries, but 30 pints is a whole lotta berries. I froze about 2 billion berries for future use, and then I made jam.

I have to tell you that the recipes out there on the world wide web are sort of scary. They include ratios like 4 cups of berries to 6 cups of sugar. Why not just eat candy? I finally found a recipe that called for 4 cups of crushed berries to 3 cups of sugar.

See my "new" canner? My friend Tracy told me someone was offering a hot water canner on Freecycle, so I emailed the offerer and somehow managed to snag this for free! I have been dreaming of jam, pickles, canned peaches and green beans ever since.

Two cups of mashed raspberries. I enjoy mashing berries with my potato masher. Why is it so fun to squish them up?

I obviously used a cooked jam recipe. Basically, I heated up 4 cups of mashed raspberries over medium heat. When it was hot, I added the 3 cups of sugar. Once it came to a boil, I stirred and stirred for about 15 minutes, and then I poured it into the hot jars for processing. Pretty easy!

I thought I had jelly jars, but it turned out I had pint jars. I ended up with 6 pints of jam, which should last us a while!

And take a look at the Raspberry Incident of '09. It's good for a laugh.