Fidget

I made freezer jam out of my blueberries. It came out yummy! The pectin package, which has detailed instructions for making many kinds of jam, emphatically warned me that I shouldn’t mess with the fruit-to-sugar ratio or else my jam wouldn’t jell. But, seeing that they called for 4 cups of fruit, 7 cups of sugar, and a cup of corn syrup to prevent sugar crystals… I decided to mess with it anyway. I used 2 cups of sugar with my 4 cups of coarsely pureed blueberries, and my jam came out fine. It’s quite firm, too, it just has a lot of runny juice along with it. So it’s not so great for peanut butter sandwiches, though if you eat ‘em right away it’s OK. But excellent for other purposes such as a topping for pancakes or yogurt or ice cream or…

Even though my freezer was already laden with frozen whole blueberries, 3 jam jars and 4 yogurt cups full of jam, I decided to go blueberry picking again as I’d been invited by the K’s - GK and her daughters, M and A. Another friend, CO, came too. This time, the weather wasn’t nearly so hot, it was quite a cloudy day. The berry bushes were wilder, bushier, and more tangled. But, get this - the blueberries were twice as big as the ones I’d picked before, and those were big, too. Wow. I tried to restrain myself and not pick too many, because I’d run out of freezer space if I came back with another 6+ pounds of berries!

Team Blueberry

Gotta pick ‘em all!

Victory!

Aren’t they Bluetiful?

Left: normal-sized berry. Right: GI-NORMOUS berry. Told ya.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Cooking and Dining, Home Town. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.