Jam-uary

You may recall I lost my mind last week, and bought enough strawberries to single handedly end world hunger. The week before my crazy shopping expedition, the random thought of "Oh it would be nice to have a crack at making jam" had floated through my head, and when my local greengrocers flashed up a super special of 15 punnets of strawberries for $8.00 on Facebook I just took it as a sign that the universe was saying "Go Forth and Make Jam, Dudette"

I've spent the last week consulting the internet and my mother, Patty, and anyone else I thought might have jam making advice. I have a lot to live up to, my mothers strawberry jam is the best strawberry jam on the planet. Just ask Mr. P who manages to steal a jar out of her store cupboard every single time we visit. So basically if I screwed up the jam not only would I be wasting strawberries and sugar, I'd also be totally blowing the possibility that I'd inherited fabulous jam making genes for ever after. Oh the Pressure!

But this weekend I could delay no longer, as Mr. P was driving me nuts asking "Have you made the jam yet ?Have you made the jam yet ?" ( very reminiscent of kids on car trips constantly asking "are we there yet, are we there yet" and about as annoying) so I put my big gal panties on and dragged 2 kilos of strawberries out of the freezer. Then I called Patty one last time for moral support ,closed my eyes and made the recipe up out of my head based on the other 4536 recipes I'd read this week. 

I chucked 2 kilos of strawberries and 1.5 kilos of jam sugar in a pot with three vanilla bean pods and squeezed the juice from two lemons in there and stirred occasionally for what felt like hours but in reality was about 30 minutes. Then I did the cold plate test and voila! I had wrinkly stuff happening on the plate. That means its ready. And I only called my Mum once to get emergency jam advice during the process...

It's good stuff... totally jam-tastic.  

I ended up with about 2 litres of jam...and half of one jar is already gone. I promised to share with other people but now I'm not so sure....because this stuff really is the bomb. (it's OK Little P - your jar is already safe and sound and stashed) I'm doing the happy dance because it looks like I inherited the jam making genes after all. And that's another one of life's little adventures I can cross off my list.

Back to sewing!