Jam Time

GUESS WHAT?!

No, this isn't about Mason jamming... I made JAM! :) I'm pretty excited about it (as you may have noticed). It was a pretty funny experience, actually. I just kind of improvised and somehow got really lucky with it. I looked at a bunch of different recipes online and couldn't find one for jam with nectarines and strawberries, which is what I wanted to do. So I just made up my own. I think I got totally lucky with it setting at all! I found a tip somewhere along the way that suggested keeping a spoon in ice cold water while you are cooking the jam so that you can drop a little jam on the spoon and cool it to check what the consistency will be like after cooling. This way very helpful because my jam was still fairly runny, but when it cooled it was a nice jelly-ish consistency.

Also, I found Jessica's post on How About Orange very inspirational and useful for making my jam. Make sure you read it if you are going to try canning some jam for the first time. Her tips for saving yourself some cash on canning supplies is great and she refers you to some really helpful sites, so you don't have to dig for them yourself!

Also, canning is so cheap. I thought it would cost more, but the jars were under $7 for 12 of them. That's pretty awesome. Anyways, these are just my plain jars. I definitely plan on decorating them, but I couldn't stop myself from posting about this right away. So tune in on Friday for my recipe because you know that food belongs on a Friday. :)