Pump Up The Jam!

Without a doubt, one of my favorite things about the summer time is the availability of fresh raspberries!! And even better than that, is living in an area where they grow locally, so you can buy them at the farm rather than at the grocery store for ridiculous prices!

Only problem is, if you noticed on my "6 Words" tagging post, the word "Busy" describes me. And "Busy" makes it hard to get out to where the farms are...

But today was my lucky day! While being Busy at work, I had to drive out to our Orting office. Orting is a farming community. Many of the raspberries in the grocery store are actually grown and picked in Orting, so it's a great place to pick up berries. After dealing with the crisis at the office, I headed back to Tacoma, with a quick pit stop at one of the farms, and left with 3 of these...



I bought them so that they could be made into Jam (homemade freezer Jam is so good, you capitalize it!) to enjoy until next summer... But Cindy and I have had a VERY shaky track record with successfully making Jam. We have an EXCELLENT track record with accidentally making Ice Cream Topping, but the problem is, we don't want a freezer full of Ice Cream Topping. We want JAM!!

So tonight I pulled out a secret weapon... I called on one of my sisters (I've got six of them, and I'm pretty sure they ALL know how to make Jam that actually turns into Jam - but I called Karen, because my most recent stash of Jam was Jam that I swiped from her a few weeks ago... I figured she'd be willing to tutor me so she'd have a better chance at keeping her own Jam this time around...) to help walk me through the process.

It didn't take long to figure out where I'd screwed up last time... And it was a big, I'd even say MAJOR screw up. No need to describe it here, let's just say I was very grateful to have Karen on the phone, because without her, I would have repeated my mistake, and would now be wondering why I have 14 pints of Ice Cream Topping. And no, the fact that we made 2 Gallons of homemade Ice Cream yesterday wouldn't be a good enough excuse!!

Well, fast forward four hours, and I have a very sore back.

I also have...



Beautiful, Sweet, Delicious, and FIRMLY, FULLY SET Raspberry Jam!

Now that I know I can actually do it - THANK YOU, KAREN!! - I'm going to need an excuse to go out to Orting again within the next week, because they said that's about how long their raspberry crop will last. And then we need to find a big free-for-all blackberry patch... And then we need to go down to Tacoma's Blueberry Park where you can pick all the blueberries you want for free!

Oh yeah, and we're gonna need a bigger freezer...