apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The whole family can enjoy picking strawberries, your older kids can help you make it and then everyone can enjoy eating it! If you aren't near a "you pick it" strawberry joint, you can swing by the farmer's market like we did last weekend. Here's what you'll need:

• strawberries
• sugar
• pectin
• fresh lemon juice (some recipes don't require this)

We used the directions inside our box of pectin, but here are a few tutorials you might want to take a quick look at:

• Make and Takes
• House on Hill Road

We only had a few proper canning jars around so we scrounged around for any glass jars we could find (eating a bunch of pickles so we could use the jar in the process). We used about 2 quarts of strawberries which made a LOT more than we expected and more than we anticipate eating in a year so we've already begun gifting them - to the upstairs neighbors who had a baby last week and to a friend who came for dinner this week. We used empty baby food jars to make some smaller servings for our single friends so we feel good about reusing some of those. (Remember to leave about a 1/2 inch of head space in any glass jars you freeze).

We're pretty traditional with our jam eating and mostly use it on toast, but your kids may like it on pancakes, waffles or over ice cream. Our son likes it in his hair!