Strawberry Jam and Strawberry-Banana Jam

Yep, it's Plant City, FL strawberry season, the BEST strawberries on earth. We happened upon a Farmer's Market in Tampa a week ago, and I bought three $8 flats (12 overfilled pint baskets =1 flat). Half a flat went to momma and daddy, the other half went to my sister Patty, and the other two flats took up occupancy in the fruit and the vegetable drawers of my fridge until the Easter holiday passed.

I made a batch of strawberry jam, using this recipe by Pioneer Woman. It is a two-part directions, so you'll have to click for part two once you've completed the first steps.  Pioneer Woman is great! She does things simply and does them right. The only thing I do different is, I slosh in some vinegar (maybe a quarter cup) just before sitting the filled jars in to boil.  Doing this keeps the jars from getting a chalky residue from hard water, and this way, I don't have to wipe the jars off afterwards. I came out with six one-pint jars for this recipe.

Because I like variety when I'm cooking a large batch of anything, I broke things up and whipped up this recipe for Strawberry-Banana Jam. We had bananas with spots and tons of strawberries, so why not give it a go? This recipe produced 7 & 1/2 eight ounce (half-pint) jars. Mark said it smells wonderful, but I have a cold and sadly, cannot taste nor smell any of these recipes. I smeared some on buttered bread, but could have been eating pond scum and wouldn't realize it. Ugh. I hate having a cold! Mark said it ta"interesting" with only a mild hint of banana. He was glad it didn't have that awful artificial banana taste.

Still more strawberries. I made two more repeats of the original plain Strawberry Jam recipe by Pioneer Woman. I made this last year and I KNOW it's wonderful.  Better make a lot, as my friends and family have been begging for more after sampling last years' batch. I made two more batches with the strawberries (and jars) I had remaining. Total for 2 flats: 20 pints, using a mix of half-pint and pint jars.

There is nothing more satisfying than the pop-pop-pop of lids as they seal!

MUST BE JELLY, CUZ JAM DON'T SHAKE LIKE THAT!

I made jam, not jelly, but isn't that a funny thing to say?

Strawberry Jam and Strawberry-Banana Jam

Yep, it's Plant City, FL strawberry season, the BEST strawberries on earth. We happened upon a Farmer's Market in Tampa a week ago, and I bought three $8 flats (12 overfilled pint baskets =1 flat). Half a flat went to momma and daddy, the other half went to my sister Patty, and the other two flats took up occupancy in the fruit and the vegetable drawers of my fridge until the Easter holiday passed.

I made a batch of strawberry jam, using this recipe by Pioneer Woman. It is a two-part directions, so you'll have to click for part two once you've completed the first steps.  Pioneer Woman is great! She does things simply and does them right. The only thing I do different is, I slosh in some vinegar (maybe a quarter cup) just before sitting the filled jars in to boil.  Doing this keeps the jars from getting a chalky residue from hard water, and this way, I don't have to wipe the jars off afterwards. I came out with six one-pint jars for this recipe.

Because I like variety when I'm cooking a large batch of anything, I broke things up and whipped up this recipe for Strawberry-Banana Jam. We had bananas with spots and tons of strawberries, so why not give it a go? This recipe produced 7 & 1/2 eight ounce (half-pint) jars. Mark said it smells wonderful, but I have a cold and sadly, cannot taste nor smell any of these recipes. I smeared some on buttered bread, but could have been eating pond scum and wouldn't realize it. Ugh. I hate having a cold! Mark said it ta"interesting" with only a mild hint of banana. He was glad it didn't have that awful artificial banana taste.

Still more strawberries. I made two more repeats of the original plain Strawberry Jam recipe by Pioneer Woman. I made this last year and I KNOW it's wonderful.  Better make a lot, as my friends and family have been begging for more after sampling last years' batch. I made two more batches with the strawberries (and jars) I had remaining. Total for 2 flats: 20 pints, using a mix of half-pint and pint jars.

There is nothing more satisfying than the pop-pop-pop of lids as they seal!

MUST BE JELLY, CUZ JAM DON'T SHAKE LIKE THAT!

I made jam, not jelly, but isn't that a funny thing to say?

Peach-a-pa-looza!

Mark and I bought the last half-bushel box of peaches a week ago at the farmer's market.  They said it was the last of the season, which made this box of fuzzy pink deliciousness even more special!  Once home, the peaches went in every window sill to ripen.  They were really not ripe at all and as hard as brickbats!  Once soft, I dropped a few at a time into boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then into an ice bath, then slipped the skins off and sliced sliced sliced until no more feeling was in my hands.  I squeezed a meyer lemon from mom's tree over the whole batch and sat it in the fridge to figure out perzactly what the plan is.  Pickled peaches? Peach preserves?  My sister Patty suggested peach butter in the crock pot.  We have a winner!

The recipe is simple...fill my big crock with sliced peaches, 4 cups sugar, 2 T cinnamon, 1 tsp ground cloves, 1/2 tsp allspice and cook all day on low with the lid ajar.  Once it seems cooked down enough, I will use my immersion blender to liquefy before canning.  The canning cook time is 20 minutes.  Here's the link to the recipe, along with some yummy pictures.

There is still a good potful of sliced peaches left that didn't fit in the crock pot.  I'll make pickled peaches!  This recipe looks good!  I just kind of slosh in what I think will taste good... The cin, allspice, cloves, vinegar and the juice from the peaches go into the pot when I tasted it, yum yum! The announcement goes out - "I could drink this peachy vinegar juice for lunch, it's so good!"   I'm not exactly a measurement cooker. Follow your heart and taste buds.

On the back burner of the stove?  Big old white lima beans that soaked overnight.  Daddy's special dinner request: lima beans and rice with ham and spring onions.  Meeeeow meow said the kitty!

Oh gee whiz, I was taking down a box of half-pint jars from the pantry to wash for canning, but instead, they are filled with blueberry-orange conserve and blueberry and strawberry jellies!  Oops.  So glad to see that I didn't give everything away, as I thought last week, "Aw rats...no more strawberry jam!" I will have to make a trip to the store for more jars.   Looks like it's time to make a big old honkin' batch of datil pepper sauce too!  The bush has been bearing pepper after pepper and as they ripen, I toss them into a baggiein the freezer for future sauce cooking.

Datil Pepper Jelly

1 ½ cups cider vinegar
9 datil peppers
1 green pepper
6 cups sugar
8 oz certo
3-4 drops green food coloring

Directions:
Place datil peppers, green pepper and ½ c vinegar into blender.
Blend until completely liquefied.
Place sugar into med saucepan, add datil/vinegar mixture.
Rinse blender bowl with remaining vinegar and place in saucepan. Bring to boil and simmer 2-3 minutes.
Add certo and remove from heat.
Cool slightly then pour into jelly jars. Seal.
Can be refrigerated or hot sealed and store in cool dark place for 3-6 months.
Personal Notes: Use the small wide mouth jelly jars so they can be placed on a platter with crackers and served from the container.

I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS RECIPE, JUST SAVING IT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE. MEW

Salsa Amigo!

When I bought strawberries to make jam, I also got a big ole honkin' bag of tomatoes, 3 jalapeños, a bunch of cilantro and a big sweet onion.  I didn't follow a recipe, just dipped the tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds and then an ice water bath to peel them.  Next, I cored and squeezed out the seeds and chopped them up. Chopped the onion and cored and seeded the peppers before chopping them pretty fine. I cut up the whole bunch of cilantro with some kitchen shears.  It didn't seem tomatoey enough so I stirred in two small cans of tomato paste, a cup or two of water, and about a half cup of vinegar.

Once hot, I filled the hot jars (they were in the canner pot) and once lidded - back into the hot water to boil for 15 minutes. Slosh in a couple of ounces of vinegar to keep the exterior of the jars from clouding.  Oh the satisfying pop-pop-pop when the jars start to cool and seal.  Seven pints is almost a gallon...Looking good!

Runny Jam/Preserves Fix

Every now and then, perfectly followed directions end up being a runny failure instead of set jam.  It may be the humidity, but there is just no rhyme or reason.  This may never happen to you, but if it does, here's the fix:

You can redo up to 8 cups of runny jam at a time. The portions are PER CUP of runny jam.  FYI - a 1.75 oz box of pectin measures out to 6 teaspoons.

1 tablespoon water, 1 1/2 teaspoon powdered pectin, mix and bring to a boil.

Add 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 cup of jam and bring to a boil over high heat while stirring constantly. Boil 1/2 minute. Skim any foam, fill your jars and reprocess.

I did 8 cups, so I used the following proportions: 8 tablespoons of water, 12 teaspoons of pectin, 16 tablespoons sugar. 

It was a pain in the neck, opening all those perfectly sealed jars and (sigh) dumping jam back into the pot, then washing and reheating all the jars.  I had to buy new lids, as the seals are a one-time thing. And I had to buy four more packets of Sure Jell.  NOW my jam is perfect.  It was so good syrupy, I kept a couple of half pint jars to use as pancake or ice cream syrup.  Yummy!

Strawberry Preserves

Plant City (near Tampa) is the strawberry growing mecca of Florida and the fruit is at their peak in early March.  Yesterday I got the great news that our house is under contract and we will be moving to Jacksonville and away from Apopka in Central Florida with the most wonderful fruit stand on earth, Maters & Taters Produce, who always gets hundreds of flats of Plant City Goodness.  Here is their FaceBook page.

I watched this video by Bobby Hughes with HP Firearms on how to make and can strawberry preserves.
It is exactly the recipe I was looking for!  For those of you that don't want to watch a 20 minute video, Pioneer Woman has a two-part instructional, but I prefer Bobby's recipe (add PW's pat of butter though). I hull my fruit with a knife, but I prefer to do PW's style of mashing the strawberries with a potato masher, but not as finely) instead of Bobby's cutting into chunks, which seems too much like work to me.
Pioneer Part I - Making strawberry jam/preserves and Pioneer Part II - canning

10 cups diced or mashed strawberries (4 lbs)
9 3/4 cups sugar (4 lbs)
9 T Ball brand pectin (1/2 C + 1 T)
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1 T butter
3/8 cup water (that's 1/4 C + a half of 1/4 C)
12 half-pint jars, lids, bands
1 Canning pot of water
2 T vinegar

• Start heating canning pot of water with 12 half pint jars standing upright and with just enough to cover the rims of the jars.  Bring to almost a boil while you make the preserves.
• Put strawberries in a large pot with heat on 6 (medium).
• Add: water, lemon juice, and pectin (half at a time, stirring it in well)
• Add a pat of butter so you won't end up with a big pile of foam.
• Bring heat up to 8 to boil.  
• Reduce heat  to 6 and slowly stir in the sugar.  It will start to thicken and darken.
• Take heat back to 8 and stir every 30 seconds or so to keep sugar from sticking to bottom of pot.
• Bring to a boil and boil hard for 1 minute.
• Remove from heat and stir for 3 minutes, then let it rest
• Skim off foam with a teaspoon. (It's great on toast!)
• Pour a jar of boiling water over lids and rims.
• Reduce water heat and remove half of the jars to a towel near the stove.
• Add 2 T vinegar to the water so the jars won't come out cloudy.
• Ladle strawberry and juice into the jars, leaving 1/4 to 1/2 inch headroom
• Clean jar rims well (sticky strawberry juice will prohibit the lids from sealing).
• Place lids and finger tighten (snug but not tight) bands
• Put the filled jars in the hot water and remove the empties to fill. Once you have all twelve lidded jars in the water, it should just cover the tops by just under an inch of water
• Bring heat back up to 7-8 so the water will boil.
• Once the water is at a continuous rolling boil, set your kitchen timer for 10 minutes 
• Remove from heat and set timer for 5 minutes of "sitting in the water to calm down" time.
• Finally, gently and upright, move jars to a towel to sit overnight to cool.  After a few minutes of cooling, you should hear the pop-pop-pop of lids sucking in (sealing).  Listen for 12.  You can test the tops by pressing a (cooled jar) lid in the middle and if it pops back, it didn't seal.  Those jars should go in the fridge (and gifted to friends) to be used first.  The rest can sit on a pantry shelf for up to five years, but in reality, they won't last that long!

One flat of strawberries and five pounds of sugar produced just over 10 pints (20 cups) of jam.

My house smells delicious!

Datil Pepper Sauce

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Datil Pepper Sauce in the Crock Pot

Datil peppers are easiest to pick at night, because when the sun goes down, they lift their leaves and you can see each and every pepper hanging on the trees like bright little green, yellow and orange christmas ornaments.  I picked a cup last night and added it to the big baggie I keep in the freezer with previous harvests.  My datil peppers are not seasonal, but an ongoing process, they just keep bearing and bearing with each pepper in a different stage of development.  If you wait until they all turn orange, this will trigger the plant to stop bearing, so I just keep picking and picking.

Today is an at home day, but I have a lot to do, and hanging around the stove all day to stir stir stir is not in my schedule.  I don't have time or desire to sandblast the pot after it's cooked all day either, as the sauce tends to stick on the bottom if you don't give it attention every ten minutes.  Enter crock pot!  (insert angelic harp music) This is my fourth crock pot in 30 years, the Rival Smart Pot Crock Pot, a 7-quart programmable genius of a crock pot!  I'll give it two big thumbs up for the programmable timer. Choose 4 or 6 hours for High, and 8 or 10 hours for Low.  After the time is up, it switches to warm for four more hours to keep dinner hot until everyone is home.  The only thing I would change is, I prefer a big thick heavy lid, not this thin thing with a metal rim.  I find that the heavy glass ones keep a water seal, which is the basis of how a crock pot works (heat is a given).  This one requires a bit of pressure and I have an old dark colored beach towel that I fold and place on top to weigh it down.  That is my only complaint and since I have said this, I will look on ebay for an oval corningware type lid that may fit.

The peppers and onions and other secret ingredients were introduced to the magic blades of my wonderful and amazing Ninja XL Master Prep Blender.  Any other blender is a gravy grinder compared to this workhorse!  If the house was on fire and I had to grab one small appliance from my kitchen, it would be this blender.  So I put the raw vegetables in and zip zip zip, everything was done in an instant.  After I dumped this into the pot, I added a little vinegar (I was going to add vinegar to the pot anyway) to rinse the solids out, then to wash the blender, I gave a little squirt of Dawn, followed by a half blender of hot water.  Zip zip zip, rinse rinse, zip zip, rinse.  Done!  I love this way of washing a blender.  It's genius!  The blades in the Ninja are razor sharp and this simple wash trick saves me from injury, as I've cut myself on it before.  

By 7am, the mouth watering recipe was cranking away in the crock pot. I've made it often enough that a recipe or measuring isn't necessary.  I plan to use both the 6+4 hour (10 hours total) HIGH cook time.  My backup plan is, if it isn't cooked well enough (as I normally cook it for ten hours on the stove), then I will pull out the big guns and finish it off in the pressure cooker.  Wish me luck!  Too bad you can't scratch and sniff the computer screen.  This smells so good, I want to swim in it!

I filled 13 half pint jars and 4 pint jars and every single lid popped in, so they are canned and good on the shelf for a couple of years I guess.  Recipients of my hot sauce tend to return the jars with a plea to please refill, so I have a variety of jars hanging around.  I will, as long as my plants keep producing!

Blueberry Jams and Blueberry Basil Vinegar

BLUEBERRIES! It was a fun hour of picking and Mark and I ended up with about 20 cups of blueberries for $18. We brought them home, rinsed and found only 2 green berries, not bad.

After canning today, I still have about six cups of blueberries left.

The first thing I did was to start some blueberry basil vinegar. Doesn't that sound dreamy? After four weeks of a swirl every day or two, I'll strain off the fruit and we'll have blueberry goodness to mix with oil and sprinkle on our salads. Is your mouth watering too?

The next recipe I did was Blueberry Citrus Conserve. I thought of how much daddy loves blueberries and how much he and momma both love orange marmalade. What a wonderful combo! I ended up with six half-pints.

Finally, I made some Mixed Berry Jam. I increased the recipe to use six cups of blueberries and two cups of strawberries that I had purchased at the height of Plant City Strawberry season and sugared, then froze. I didn't want it too sweet, so I reduced the sugar to 4 cups instead of 6. Running short of smaller jars, I canned three pints and about 2/3 of a quart jar that will go right into the fridge once it has cooled. The sweetness is perfect and the flavor of the strawberries and blueberries is 50/50, only a mild disappointment as I wanted more blueberry flavor, but a taste test on a slice of toasted buttered farm bread confirmed absolute deliciousness!