We're Jammin'
Nope, not to Bob Marley, but with actual strawberries, rhubarb, sterilized jars, boiling with 1/8” of head space in the jar (really, my friend measured it), etc. It was really, really fun despite the incredible heat in the kitchen and our initial batch of strawberry rhubarb jam for which we forget to pre-cook the rhubarb but that mistake yielded a nonetheless delicious concoction we now lovingly refer to as Crunchy Strawberry Rhubarb Jam.
From Whole Foods Market website, I found this funny tidbit about rhubarb:
That’s funny.Garden rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum) is an extremely hardy perennial herb closely related to garden sorrel. It is sometimes called "pie-plant" by Americans in deference to its eminence as a pastry filling. As an herb, rhubarb is botanically a vegetable but was officially ruled to be a fruit by the US Customs Court in 1947 because of its customary use in that capacity, an example, perhaps, of inappropriate judicial activism.
And this:
A handful of sugar and a raw stalk of rhubarb is a pleasant memory for anyone fortunate enough to have had access to fresh rhubarb as a child.
I was one of those fortunate children. Rhubarb was my first lik-m-stix.
Tonight, after dinner, we enjoyed little crostinis with homemade butter topped with homemade strawberry rhubarb jam (the crunchy kind). YUM! And don't worry about our safety - one of us was an experienced jammer who was kind enough to share her expertise with the rest of us.
Comments
I thought the tiny size would be perfect for total consumption on one good breakfast in bed morning!
It was messy and not something that I would undertake without a huge chunk of time and willingness to have all 4 burners of my stove on for the afternoon. Oh yeah, and a professional canner.
It will be interesting to see if the jam-making thing catches on with Objectivists like the butter-making did in the last few weeks!