treats for all

best landscaping plant ever.

So the jam I made today came out well. I knew that it was strawberry-jam-making season. There were a few hints:
1. Bellevue strawberry festival (which I unfortunately missed this year)
2. Super hot weather
3. Driveway landscaping producing awesome berries
4. Detailed notes in jam-making cookbook are always within about a 2-week range

my much-annotated recipe

I succumbed. At the grocery store there were flats of local berries. You know, the kind where each berry is garnet red and still has an inch or so of stem sprouting out from the leaves. You can smell them about 5 feet away like red honey. I got a flat today and set to work. It was not as hot today as it has been but still was lovely and the air felt great on bare skin (see: bikini accident). I made two batches of my popular strawberry and lime jam. This year I got my beloved Weck tulip jars to function properly.


I love those Weck jars. So much that I never want to use them because then I will not have them anymore. Ridiculous! Today I forced myself to use four of them and will have to give them away because otherwise I'm just going to set them on windowsills and admire the red jam within and never want to open them. For now I will allow myself to hoard the rest of the empty jars.

the metal clips come off after the jars have cooled

At any rate, five pounds of berries were reduced to a stack of tasty sweet jars. You can't exactly survive on fresh jam alone, so I also made some tabouleh. Then at dusk I took out leftovers for the chickens. They dined on parsley and mint stems, a few heels of bread, and a mealy apple. Happy chickens....now lay me some eggs!

tabouleh for me

treats for the girls