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We went strawberry picking this weekend. It was the day before the kid’s third birthday. The weather was cool and dry. The Hood River strawberries had just come into season. I’d been wanting to give jam-making a try. How could we not go?

This is what we came home with:


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Thirty-one pounds of Hood River strawberries. That’s a lot of jam, my friends. That’s also $41 right there. The berries were picked and purchased with the intention of replacing our weekly $6 jar of jam with the homemade stuff. So that means we’ll be saving six bucks a week from here on out. But it also adds $41 on to the food budget for last week. So yeah. We went over budget last week, after all my proclamations of victory on Friday. That said, without the strawberries, we spent just $106.55 last week. So with no fruit-picking planned for this week, I’m feeling pretty confident about the budget.

But those three very full flats of strawberries don’t just prove that we went over budget. They also prove that I’m made of six kinds of crazy. Anyone who’s made jam before, as we had not, probably guessed that as soon as they saw those flats. See, I have this tendency to get very excited about a new project and throw myself headfirst into it without doing much by way of, oh…researching, or planning, or…well, THINKING about what the hell I’m getting into. It’s gotten me into some real trouble over the years, this habit of mine, but it’s also brought some wonderful things into my life. But it does often mean that Billy gets dragged along for one hell of a ride. This particular ride saw us making strawberry jam into the wee hours of the morning. Fifty jars of strawberry jam. (And that wasn’t even all the berries. I froze half a flat to use in smoothies, etc.) Strawberry is the kiddo’s favorite, but Billy and I prefer blueberry jam. In fact, blueberries might possibly be my very favorite food on earth. Which means more berry picking when the blueberries are in season, which means more jams, which means we’re going to have strawberry jam in our cupboard for a good long time.

Oh–did I say strawberry jam? I meant to say syrup. Strawberry syrup. Fifty jars of strawberry goodness that Did Not Set Up. It’s delicious in yogurt and over waffles, both delivery methods tried around here in the past couple days. And maybe, MAYBE it’ll firm up a bit more over the next few days, but I don’t have high hopes for it. We used a recipe that didn’t call for pectin–just berries, lemon juice, and sugar. It’s DELICIOUS, but it’s runny. Apparently you need to mix in some not-yet ripe fruit as well as the juicy ripe stuff, because the unripe stuff has more natural pectin. We had no idea. See? Research mighta come in handy. Not to mention the fact that I’d for some reason assumed we could cook the stuff all up in three big batches. Nope. You have to small-batch it or it doesn’t work, for some reason. Or that’s what the internet and my neighbor told me. So we did something like fifteen batches of the stuff. Oy vey. I don’t want to see another strawberry for a good long while.

This is what forty-seven jars of strawberry syrup look like in a cabinet:
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We’ve learned our lesson and will only pick two flats of blueberries. But after the blueberries come the marionberries. And then the peaches, and the pears… I think I’m gonna need more jars.

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