Canning Cherry Jam

I finished canning my cherry jam last night and am pleased as punch with how it turned out :) I've been making pectin free jam the last couple of years but I've never made a cherry jam so I did some looking on the internet to see what I could find but pectin free recipes are far and few.

I usually use apple to replace store bought pectin but from what I could find lemon was the fruit of choice to combine with the cherries so that's what I did *grin*. I used 4 cups of cherries total per batch, 2 cups roughly chopped in the food processor & 2 cups of halved cherries plus 1 lemon rind and all the juice. It smelled awesome!!

Next was to get that perfect jammy consistency :) The best way to tell when your jam is ready to be put in the jars is to do a simple spoon test by placing a spoon of jam in the freezer for a minute and then pushing the jam up the spoon with your fingernail to see if the jam wrinkles and stays put. If it does that then you're finished!

I passed the spoon test 3 times and now have 15 jars of yummy cherry jam... make that 13 as we have done a wee bit of taste testing *grin*.

Are you canning any jam this summer?

~ Rosina

Fresh Cherries

I am covered in cherry stains and loving it *grin*.

When we were at Coombs this weekend all of the fresh Okanagan fruit was being delivered by the box load!! The whole market smelled like fruit :) There were cherries, apricots, peaches, plums... It brought back memories of when I was a little girl. There was a traveling fruit man that would come every summer to my mom's door with boxes of fresh fruit that he picked up in the Okanagan and then would peddle door to door. My mom would always buy peaches and this time I bought cherries :)

I've been dying to make cherry jam but it always seems to be so expensive to buy those little bags at the grocery store but by buying a 20 pound case I cut my cost in half! I didn't really want to pit 20 pounds of cherries all by myself though so I halved the load with my mom *grin*.

The kids pulled the stems off as we sliced and pitted and a few of the doublers were claimed as cherry drop earrings *grin*.

Mmm, they taste incredible. I've got a bunch put aside for jam, some to freeze, and a handful that are going to be a special treat on our crepe blintzes that I'm making for dinner :)

~ Rosina