Good friends, join me while I’m Canning LOTS of Strawberry Jam | Tons of food preservation!! We cook up and can strawberry and blackberry jam. Also, on this from scratch massive food preservation day we make homemade vanilla, activate our newest water kefir grains, and get a new scoby going with green tea kombucha! Additionally, I resurrect our two well-loved bread machines!!
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Canning LOTS of Strawberry Jam | Tons of Food Preservation!
Canning LOTS of Strawberry Jam | Tons of Food Preservation!!
Food Preservation Hopes & Dreams
In this video, I bring you along with me as I am canning LOTS of strawberry jam, plus tons of other food preservation!! I’ve had big canning hopes and dreams ever since my oldest children were babies. We started small when we were praying about and planning ways to stretch our little grocery budget. Over 20 years later, I’m still learning how to do tons of food preservation!
I like to share my food preservation learning journey with you as I grow in my skills. Books like the Ball Blue Book Guide and Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preservation are very helpful. Also, I find the National Center for Food Preservation to be an excellent resource!
I am who I am, so when it comes to canning strawberry jam, I can’t just do a little bit of jam. We are canning LOTS of strawberry jam!! There were several boxes of frozen berries from an Azure Standard order from the Fall 2022. I also mix in some mulberries that had been waiting to be processed. We cooked these down and processed them for strawberry jam, and canned them using my trusty Amish Water Bath Canner.
Resurrecting the Bread Machines
During this massive mega canning project, I also resurrected my two bread machines! One is a Bread Man Machine I bought new about eight years ago and then somewhere down the line, I found an amazing thrift store deal on another bread machine. I frequently see bread machines while thrifting! You should keep an eye out for one!
Back in my 100 year old farmhouse and forest house days, my bread machine was running most days to give us a constant supply of fresh bread! When we moved to this house in 2020, I fell of the wagon with that because I just didn’t have enough space in my baby kitchen. But today I’m attempting to get into our bread machine routine again! In this video, I make four loaves of homemade banana bread in the bread machine using my duck eggs! Just in case you’re wondering how it all turned out, Tobin kept exclaiming to me, “Banana Bread! Thank you, Mommy!”
This is a first food preservation for me…
Also, join me as I make homemade vanilla for the very first time, using vanilla beans I purchased from Amazon. It is good to get these started so they’ll be ready in late Fall, early Winter for holiday recipes and to give as gifts! I think the bottles of vanilla turned out beautifully and, in the Fall, I’m going to be so thankful I took the short amount of time to put these together!
In this video, you’ll also watch as I start my green tea Kombucha with my new scoby. I had to get a new one going after something happened with my old one. My plan is to keep it in a warm corner by my stove and hope for the best with this new one!
At the end of our tons of food preservation, I was hoping to have at least 48 half pints of jam. My math was pretty close as we ended up with 44 half pints: 23 strawberry 21 blackberry half pints. We also already worked through an extra half pint of jam that the kids enjoyed with their banana bread! We just couldn’t wait to try it out!
Canning LOTS (more) Strawberry Jam 🍓
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Soooo…after our weekend of canning strawberry jam, we found a surprise deal on strawberries after church at Jon Henry. We just had to take advantage of this deals and bought an additional 40 pounds of strawberries. Of course, we had to make more strawberry jam!! We made it part of our homeschool lessons at the beginning of the week. The kiddos prepared cherries and strawberries for jam and we also chopped up some mango for freeze drying in the Harvest Right Freeze Dryer chopping.
We didn’t get to the cherry jam by the end of the video, but we processed 30 MORE pints of strawberry jam!!
Watch my Massive Food Preservation Day How Much Can We Get Done?! where you can join me for all these adventures PLUS more chicken chat, more life stories, what I’m feeding my family, seed chat, and also I start water kefir with my new grains, too!!
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