The slow road to domesticity

This past week has found me on the road to becoming a domestic goddess. Or at least that's the way I like to think of it. I somehow got the bug up my butt to pick cherries, which then turned into picking raspberries, which then turned into making jam. Remember that post a few days back about easing my way into canning? Not so much. Unless you're hardcore enough to consider 44 jars of various jams, 6 jars of a top secret experiment, 2 rhubarb/cherry crumbles, a homemade sweet cherry pie, and a batch peaches and cream Popsicles to be "easing."
I have to say though, I've had a blast.
As I mentioned, my domestic adventure starts with picking some cherries. Check out Steph's blog post here for a full run-down and more pictures of cherries and a massive cherry pitter. Cherry picking itself was actually much easier than I thought it would be, and being that it was such a nice day when we went, I was really enjoying the adventure. The orchards are so pretty! And who can resist taking pictures of delicious ripe cherries?

Spicer's Cherry OrchardsRipening Cherries in the trees

After cherry picking was done, I moved on to raspberries. Somehow from last year, I had already forgotten how much I dislike picking raspberries. All the bending and the leaning in the hot sun makes me rather grumpy. Although I do like being able to shove as many berries as I can fit into my mouth at free will. :-) Post raspberry picking, there was a trip to the Ann Arbor farmer's market to get the last of some local strawberries, then I headed home to play with all my loot.

Look at all those berries and cherries!

And that doesn't even include the 3 lbs of rhubarb and 10 peaches I had sitting in the fridge waiting for my jam making adventure! My goodness, that's a lot of fruit.
So armed with a whole lot of fruit, canning jars, and pectin, and with limited off-hand experience, I ripped open my ball blue book of canning and got to work. I decided on recipes for strawberry-rhubarb jam, a peach raspberry lavender jam, and a sweet-tart cherry amaretto jam. Most of the recipes are pretty basic, and call for washing/hulling/chopping about 4 cups of fruit mixed with a given amount of sugar, lemon juice, and either a package or two of pectin. For the strawberry rhubarb, I added nothing extra besides the sugar and lemon. For the peach raspberry lavender, I got a few cuttings of lavender from my garden, put them in some cheesecloth, and poured about 1/4 cup of boiling water over the packet. I then mixed in this lavender scented water with lemon juice in the jam.

Lavender sachet

For the cherry amaretto, same thing, but here I used amaretto to mostly replace the lemon juice. The next step in jam making calls for heating the macerated fruits at a boil that can't be stirred down, adding the sugar or pectin, and then boiling for another minute.

Macerated strawberry/rhubarbBoiling up some peach/raspberry/lavender

When the minute is up, you start ladling the goopy mess into hot sterilized canning jars. It looks a little like this:

Ladling jam into jars

Once the jars are full to about 1/4" head space, you take your hot lids, set them, hand tighten the outer caps, and plunk the jar into a canner (or in my case, a big pasta pot) to boil for 10 minutes.

Hot canning action

As the jars come out of the boiling water, you set them in a cool undisturbed place for about 12-24 hours. If you hear that blessed popping, you know the jars have been appropriately sealed. The noise was actually a weird sort of symphony to my ears. Beautiful music leads to beautiful results though, and check out my haul after all was said and done!

That's a lot of jams

Overall, I would say my first experience with canning was pretty straightforward. Somewhat time consuming, but the overall steps are easy, so that helps. Later in the week I'll post about the crumble, the pie, and the Popsicles I made with all of my leftover fruit. Until then, the question is, does this adventure down a slow road pave my way to easier canning and pickling in the fall with my bounty of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers?? Guess we'll see. Now grow garden, grow!