A Salmon Arm Holiday

Sun-warmed, ripe strawberries still on the plant. Could anything taste better?

Bonnie invited me to come and stay with her for five days. I don’t know where the time went. David reminded me that I made strawberry jam while I was there.

I originally picked those strawberries to eat at my house for breakfast.  In fact for the first 3 days that I went to Moiya and Dave’s strawberry patch to pick the ripe berries while they were gone, I just ate the berries in the patch. I didn’t need a bucket to put them in.

The worst part of Moiya's strawberries?
Hulling them.
After I hulled the smallest one (see bottom left in picture)
there was hardly any berry left to put in the jam pot.

When I told this to Glen, I saw his eyes get big. I thought he was saying, “Wow, you are still an Albertan who can’t believe there will still be strawberries on those same plants tomorrow?”

 Having fully retired here, I took a bucket over the next time I went to the patch so I could pretend to be someone blasé about picking berries. And that is how I ended up with enough berries to make jam.

Last month I tasted some cherry jam. The best cherry jam I had ever tasted. While I was going on and on about how absolutely perfect the cherry jam was, a friend leaned over to me and said, “That is strawberry jam, Arta, with just a few berries in i?t as well as all of the syrup.” So that wasn't the best cherry jam I had ever tasted, after all.

Now that I know strawberry is still the best jam ever, I thought I would try to leave some uncrushed bits of strawberry in the jam. And that might be why we were loving it on ice cream.

Another view of Moiya and Dave's garden.
Will those cherries be ready to become the best-ever strawberry jam soon?

I read on the internet that strawberries have little pectin and so it is good to use a commercial product to firm it up. This jam wasn’t that firm. But then I only guessed at the 4 ½ cups of strawberries that it called for. 

Well, all in an hours work, and I forgot that I even made the jam until David blogged about it.


Arta