Joyful Abode

This is a guest article by my sister Jessica.

If you are interested in being a guest author for Joyful Abode, please send an email to “contribute at joyfulabode dot com”, and I will contact you.

Hopefully, guest articles will become a bi-weekly event here, so step up and make it possible!

This summer, I decided to join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). I’ve been struggling with figuring out the correct grammar for conveying that, since it doesn’t seem right to “join an agriculture”, but it does seem right to join a CSA. Maybe I should say that this summer I support CSA? But then that’s too many
supports, so I don’t think that’s right either.

But however you want to say it, for $17 a week, I get a nice big crate full of fresh fruits and veggies straight from a local farm. Since my boyfriend absolutely hates onions, I asked the farm not to include onions in our crate, which meant I got TWO boxes full of strawberries one week, one to replace the onions. We just couldn’t finish them quickly enough, or we didn’t try hard enough to finish them quickly enough, and the strawberries started looking questionable. Not wanting to waste them, I tried googling things like “overripe strawberries” and “soft strawberries” and “bruised strawberries,” only to find websites about how you should make sure not to pick overripe, bruised, or soft strawberries, even for making jam.

Despite this, I threw caution to the wind, and decided to use my soft strawberries to make jam anyway. I didn’t want to invest much effort in making the jam since the jam gurus said only to use the freshest strawberries, so I picked the easiest online recipe I could found. It doesn’t even use pectin, just strawberries, sugar, and lemon juice.

I did the “not bothering with processing” part, and I halved the recipe. There was also an interesting footnote:

“To test for jelling:

Place three plates in a freezer… after about 10 minutes of boiling
place a tsp of the liquid of the jam onto the cold plate. Return to
freezer for a minute. Run your finger through the jam on the plate…
if it doesn’t try to run back together (if you can make a line
through it with your finger) it’s ready to be canned!”

I decided I was going to do this right, or at least as right as I do things, so I put one plate in the freezer, and got my roommates candy thermometer, and set off to make jam. First of all, I would recommend using a much larger pot than your ingredients. The rolling boil of jam can be messy, and the mixture expands and fills the pot.

This ended up being a problem for me. As the mixture got hot, It would froth and boil up, and I’d have to turn down the heat so it wouldn’t spill over. This caused the temperature to drop, and I couldn’t seem to get it to 220 degrees. I was at 200 at one point, but I never measured past that.

I pulled out the frozen plate and tried the finger test, but the jam ran back together, so it supposedly wasn’t ready. I rinsed off the plate, and realized I didn’t have time to refreeze it, which is I suppose why you were supposed to put 3 plates in the freezer to start with, so I decided I was done with the jelling test. I also never saw the temperature get to 220, but at some point, the boiling mixture seemed to change texture to something much thicker, and I decided that was probably fine, and I was tired of watching my jam boil.

I later learned that you should spoon out the froth, because it does just stay in the jam otherwise (I spooned it out of the jam later). I put it in a glass bowl in the fridge and hoped for the best… and it turned out to be delicious and surprisingly jamlike! I was so impressed with myself for making jam, that I had to tell everyone I knew about my big accomplishment, and they acted impressed with me too, so it was overall a huge success.

We ate the jam on toast, bagels, croissants, and finally, biscuits.
I of course turned to Emily for her favorite biscuit recipe, and they were the perfect accompaniment to the jam. The jam was at it’s prime right after the initial refrigeration. After that, it thickened quite a bit, but was still tasty and spreadable. The biscuits (and these pictures) came two weeks after the jam was made, and it was still in great shape. The jam is also quite sweet, and although I think you should be able to make it with less sugar, I’m not sure if it would affect the texture too much.

Play around! Have fun! Eat jam!