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).