Jammin'

OMG, I made jam! after I went strawberry picking last weekend.

Cutting them up probably took longer than anything else.

And since I closed a sweet deal at work this week I bought myself a present I've been craving for a long time: a cassis Le Creuset 3.5 quart French oven.

It helped that Broadway Panhandler was having a great sale: I even got a free bakeware set with purchase!

Next: supplies!  A lid lifter and jar lifter while I was at Broadway Panhandler, Ball jars and a funnel at Walmart (they have a whole canning section!) and Canning for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff.

I really like this book: beautiful pictures, tasty-looking recipes and a soothing (and encouraging!) writing style.  So, away we go...boiling the jars...

starting to cook down the berries, adding sugar and watching it all meld together.

And finally filling the jars and processing them for a few minutes in the boiling water to create a seal.

It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be and way more fun. Maybe I shouldn't of started at 10 p.m., but I still had a good time (even tho I didn't go to sleep until 2:30 a.m. on a Monday).

Sheep & Strawberries

When my parents sent me pics of their trip to Valley Shepherd Creamery I liked them so much that they offered to take me too.  So I went to see the farm with 600 - 700 ewes who are bred with only 30 - 40 rams.  Interesting...they also have alpacas, goats, a horse and....

baby lambs!

In their Sheep Shop they sell many, many things made from sheep's milk and wool

including of course their cheeses.

I also bought some glow-in-the-dark sparkly sheep along with yogurt, gelato and butter.

Next it was on to Alstede Farms for pick-your-own strawberries.

We picked about 12.7 pounds from the fields, so next post will be about my adventure canning my first batch of strawberry jam!