Strawberries

One thing we love to do every summer is make strawberry freezer jam. So last week we made a trip to the market and bought a whole case (8 quarts) of Michigan grown strawberries!

I love the bright color!

Josiah washed all of the Tupperware® containers for us. He also washed up the strawberries.

The twins hulled the strawberries.

Instead of cutting and mashing strawberries by hand, we found that our little food processor does this job quite well. So we simply hull the strawberries, and the processor does the rest!

Mixing up the pectin is very sweaty work! For two batches we used Sure-Jell® Pectin, and for the other two we used Certo®. I think I prefer the Certo® because you just pour the jell in versus mixing it with water and thickening it on the stove.

We then mixed up the strawberry puree and the pectin.

Then poured them into the containers.

We ended up with quite a bit of jelly as you can tell! I’m not exactly sure how much jam we got out of 4 quarts of berries. I’m thinking it was close to 20 cups.

For two of the quarts, we washed and hulled the berries. . .

. . .and froze them on cookie sheets. We then put them into freezer bags to use in smoothies, bread, pies, etc.

The last two quarts of berries were left for snacking! They were warm, sweet, and delicious. And with the frozen berries above, we can look forward to enjoying strawberries for many months to come!