Strawberry Jam 2017

Annual strawberry canning weekend is over, and I’m still recuperating. Friday, I got off work, picked up the kids, and we headed out to a local u-pick strawberry farm. It was 88°, and I force my kids to help me pick 35 pounds of strawberries. They were thrilled.

I did take them to the local ice cream stand afterwards. Before dinner, even!

Saturday morning, my dear running girlfriends agreed to meet at 5:30 a.m. so I could get my run in early before going home to spend the rest of the weekend canning jam. We had a good 7-mile run, and we even saw some deer.

After that, it was all jam, all the time, only briefly interspersed with a graduation party in the afternoon. My father-in-law came over to celebrate Father’s Day, but I left that up to my husband, who barbecued outside while I got the kitchen up to a sweltering 89.7°. 😮

Sunday was more jam, but also a special breakfast, consisting of a beverage…

… and a starch…

(Okay, that was Jamie’s peanut butter and jelly biscuit. Mine just had jelly and regular butter.)  I found that biscuit recipe either last year or the year before, and it’s phenomenal. There called Sweet Buttermilk Biscuits, and they are absolutely perfect with my jam. They’re also pretty good with bacon and scrambled eggs and cheese, too. 😛

I spent all day Sunday making jam, with JJ helping me now and again.

That last one is JJ with the strawberry milkshake I made him for his help.

When it was all said and done, those 35 pounds of strawberries (minus 4 quarts because we ate those either on their own or in strawberry milkshakes) made 87 jars of strawberry jam. As a bonus, I also canned two jars of raspberry jam, using late-ripening raspberries from my own garden that I froze last fall after canning season.

As I have done for the last several years, I gave Jamie the task of lining up the jars for the traditional post-processing photo op. (I actually had people requesting it on Facebook on Sunday. My friends know me well, ha ha!) He really went all out this year…

Those are perfectly symmetrical pyramids, interspersed with a couple of bottles of wine and my prized “princess” wine glass.  I have to say, I was pretty proud of my accomplishment. It’s a ton of work, but it’s so rewarding.

I was soooo tired on Sunday. I didn’t get to bed until midnight, and after all the running and standing on my feet, there was no way I could get out of bed at 5 AM to run. So I turned off the alarm and rolled back over. If you know me, you know that it bugged me all damn day that I skipped my run. When I got home Monday night, I had about half an hour before I had to take JJ to a football camp. I decided to run a couple miles, and that turned into running 3 miles. As I got to the last mile, I realized I had a really good pace going, and I decided to see if I could bust out a sub-nine. It took everything I had, but I made it…just barely!

It’s been a long time since I’ve done that! That’s not actually my fastest mile; my fastest ever is an 8:49, but that’s the fastest mile I’ve ever done on that watch.

I cheated a little bit with my weigh-in. By the way, that reminds me that I didn’t actually post a weigh-in last week. I could lie and say that I just forgot, but I didn’t. I just had the race report to put up, and then that got delayed until the end of the week, and then it just seemed silly to do a post about my weight, because I felt like I had nothing else to say. So, in the interest of full disclosure, here is last week’s weigh in:

Ha, you probably thought I gained didn’t you? 😉 I lost a tiny bit, .4. Better than a gain, right? As far as this week, I didn’t have high hopes, because I really pigged out on Sunday. I make such good biscuits. 😛 Anyway, since I didn’t run Monday, after a day of pretty indulgent eating, I decided to give myself a pass and wait till Tuesday to weigh in. I know it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but let’s be realistic, weight-loss/maintenance is as much mental as it is physical. Maybe more so! Anyway, here’s this week’s way in:

Another small loss, and again, I’ll take it!

Thanks so much for reading!

(PS: I know I am terrible about updating my actual weigh-in page, but that’s because it’s kind of a pain to put it in that tabular format. I will try to be better about it!)