Canada Day and a little Jam

Canada Day weekend is always a holiday I look forward to! It is usually really nice out and it is also strawberry season! This year I decided I wanted to make some strawberry freezer jam for myself. I love strawberry freezer jam, and I wanted to make it with strawberries I picked myself.

So I convinced Jeff to come berry picking with me. Am I ever glad I did...I couldn't pick as much as I wanted. Jeff and I picked two 4L baskets of strawberries from Cannamore Orchards about 10 minutes from home. They said there were lots of berries, but that the season was early this year, so that weekend would be the last weekend. And were they right! Most of the berries were rotting on the plant, just too much sun!

Here is Jeff picking like the pros!

Apparently all the good berries were in the middle of the plant hidden from the sun. They were not huge berries but super sweet. After we were berry picking, I decided I wanted to work in the sewing room so that we can hang out on Canada Day downtown and eat chicken from the Chicken Farmers of Canada booth in Ottawa. But instead Jeff asked me to come outside and help him with the back yard, so sewing you are still not done!

On Canada Day, I wanted to head downtown Ottawa for some museum fun, but I wasn't feeling up to it. I then decided that we needed to get these strawberries into jam ASAP! They were already getting soft from sitting in the kitchen for 1 day! What?!? I needed topick up a couple packages of jars and sugar so that we would have enough for all the berries. I also wanted to get them done before we headed to Cornwall to see my parents and meet with friends for dinner and fireworks.

We made 4 batches of jam that produced about five 1-cup jars of jam.

Strawberry Freezer Jam in process

I ended up with five batches in the end - so that means I had about 24 jars of Jam, that had to sit for 24+ hours then go into the freezer.

19 jars of jam waiting for the freezer - 5 jars already in the freezer

So I now have enough jam for the next year! That is if I eat 2 jars a month! LOL! I confess I have a jar in the fridge now and one at work too! Yum!

So once this was done, we headed off to Cornwall for some visiting. We then met up with friends to eat at East Side Marios and then enjoy some fireworks! It was so much fun and the crowds were small (or large by Cornwall standards) but nice for us Ottawa folks.

I had a great weekend and I wish it could always be Canada Day weekend!

~E