Since I was growing blueberries, and strawberries, and raspberries in the garden and adding them to my beer bread recipes I thought why not start making jam? My wife was/is skeptical but I soldiered on.
I had a small harvest of strawberries and made a very small batch of strawberry jam, and it tasted good! Now the problem was getting enough berries for larger batches.
We live close to a blueberry farm so we took a trip there and picked about 8 pounds of blueberries! ( What were we thinking! ). Once we got them home and sorted out the leaves and stems we put them in baggies, 2 cups at a time. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of this but trust me, the freezer was full!
Now that I had an abundance of blueberries it was time to make some jam!
This was the first “test” batch to insure I was doing it right. They turned out great and everyone I shared these with just loved them so it was onward and upward to a larger batch. The next batch made 8 jars and they sold out quickly.
Now that I knew I could make larger batches I went to the store and bought a large bag of frozen strawberries (it is Winter here in northern Illinois) and made a batch of strawberry jam.
This batch made 9 jars but I only had 8 prepped so the ‘9th jar’ went into a bowl and into the fridge. It was good on ice cream later that night :).
Jalapano Jam
I stumbled across this recipe and thought I would give it a try. It uses green peppers, red peppers and jalapeño peppers. You can substitute different peppers if you want, i.e. orange instead of green, and have it still come out great.
If you want to a bit hotter flavor you could use serrano peppers instead of jalapeños, etc.
With the red, green, and jalapeño peppers this came out quite sweet. You would want to use this on cheese, or crackers, versus using it on a sandwich. It tastes great, I just don’t think I would use it on a sandwich.