Jam day!

[annis39]

So today was blueberry jam day. Yesterday we picked approximately 11 lbs. of blueberries (as well as 3 lbs of sour cherries, 2 lbs of sweet cherries, and ~1 lbs of raspberries) at one of the local pick-your-own places. This afternoon, following a slow-start day-- i.e., not out of bed until 10:15 am, made a large batch of buckwheat pancakes to eat with raspberry syrup, ran to the store to get jars, sugar, pectin, and a cherry-pitter-- I made two normal batches of blueberry jam (~9 cups of jam), and one half-size experimental super-low-sugar batch with the Pomona pectin-calcium mix. For perspective on what I mean when I say "super-low-sugar," the usual ratio of chopped fruit to sugar, even with low-sugar Sure-Jell, is 3:2. With the Pomona pectin-calcium mix, you can go as low as 4:0.75, with the upper limit being 2:1! Not feeling extraordinarily brave today, I made my ratio about 4:1, so we'll see how it goes. At any rate, I have about 18 8-oz. jars of jam and 3 12-oz ones sitting in the kitchen now. That (along with the ~15 jars of strawberry already made, and a similar amount of peach to be made next month) should keep up through til next summer, even with the usual schedule of Christmas gifting. Amusingly, the gifting tends to be the main way that the jam is consumed . . . Ryan and I just don't eat that much of it ourselves.

So the jam's done for now. However, we still have a couple things on the table for this evening, including freezing the peas we shelled two days ago, pitting and freezing the sour cherries, and washing and freezing the few blueberries that weren't chopped and jammed. And I still need to cut some oregano for drying . . . if I don't do it soon, it'll go into full bloom, and won't be nearly as good.