416 oz

Does anyone know why berries have been so affordable this summer? It's been great, even organic ones have been a steal often enough that we've had some variety of fresh berry in our fridge pretty much since May.

Yesterday in our kitchen we had 416 oz of berries. Our local market had all varieties of berries on sale AGAIN and this time they were SO affordable it was worth it to stock up and make some more jam. We needed to make some more jam because the boys in this house seem to think that it's OK to put heaps of jam on everything and the stash we made this spring is seriously depleted. Not only that, but since the last batch we've all kind of gone off store bought jam, it just doesn't taste as good. Poor Travis was reduced to Welch's one day in his PB&J and you'd think I made him eat bugs for lunch.
So, I bought 16 pounds of strawberries and 8x6oz boxes of blackberries to supplement the 8x6oz boxes already in my deep freeze. Let the jamming begin!

No strawberry jammer should be without this nifty tool. It gets the hulls out in record time and doesn't take much flesh with it. It's cute as a button, too.
Several hours later (things moved along faster after Travis came home and I had a second set of hands to help) we had JAM! Lots and lots of strawberry, and some blackberry. The blackberry is seedless, so we have more waste along the way, but I really dislike blackberry seeds in my teeth.

Think this will last those boys through the winter? Yup. And I might even be able to give some away without Travis giving me dirty looks!