Strawberries!

Strawberry season has come and gone but we made it out this year in June to enjoy the delicious fruit.  By the time we arrived one of the fields was already picked out.  Fortunately for us, the farm opened a second field.  We picked the small but very sweet Jewel variety.  While I liked these candy-sweet berries, I will admit disappointment at not being able to harvest some bigger fruit with a little more tang.  

My husband and kids holding the fruits of our labor

It was a seasonably hot day and I made sure to cover the kids and myself in sunscreen.  These past few years I've also been wearing a hat.  I used to be very self-conscious about it, but I soon realized no one really cares and I hated my head burning.  My hair is not super thick and even 15 minutes in the sun can result in a painful burn.  I found my hat at The Green Dragon, an open air flea market I had heard about in some of the Amish fiction that I read.  That was a fun find.

Here I am with my kids.

It was a fun day all around with sweet, fresh strawberries, strawberry doughnuts and strawberry cheesecake ice cream.  We will be back again next year I'm sure!

This strawberry cheesecake ice cream was so good!  The stripe of jam running through it was absolutely amazing!

Using some of the strawberries we picked, I made a small batch jam.  You can find it here.

These strawberry donuts were just too hard to resist.

Click here to see where we picked strawberries this year.  We go other places some years but this place is by far the most entertaining.  


You might also like:
Low Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam
The Pumpkin Patch
Brookfield Orchards

Lower Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam

The day we went to the strawberry patch I knew I wanted to make some jam.  But I also knew I didn't want to make a whole lot of it.  In the past I've made far too much and we just don't eat it very often so I feel like it goes to waste.  But I still wanted some jam.  Just the right amount of jam.  One jarful of jam.  And I googled the word jarful.  It's a thing.

If your jam gets foamy you can scrape it off before you dump it in the jar.

I needed to find a small batch recipe.  So where did I turn?  If you have read my blog for even a little while you might have already guessed.  I turned to Pinterest of course.  There were several small batch recipes and they were all very similar.  I opted to use the basic bones of the recipes I saw, but halve the sugar and replace the rest with granulated Splenda.

The result?  A wonderfully sweet jam with half the sugar of many recipes.  We all enjoyed it very much.

-------------------

Lower Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam

Ingredients:

1 pound or 3 3/4 cups fresh strawberries
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup granulated Splenda 
2 tablespoons lemon juice

First wash and drain your berries.  Then remove the stems.  Next, slice the strawberries and add them to a medium sized pot.  

Stir in sugar and Splenda.  Bring mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring continually, then add lemon juice.

Boil (and keep stirring!) until jam reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer.  If you don't have one, it takes about 15-20 minutes of boiling.  If you don't quite get to quite 220 the jam will be fine, just not as thick.    

Shortly before your jam is ready take a clean jar and fill it with hot tap water.  A heated jar is less likely to crack when filled with hot jam.  Dump the water out just before you add your jam.  Once your jam is at 220, add it into the warm jar using a wide mouth funnel.  Put a lid on it and let it cool on the counter.

Once the jar is cool put it in the refrigerator and enjoy it within 2 months.  

---------------------------

The recipe came out great and I loved that I could easily sub in the Splenda.  The recipes I saw did not recommend Splenda but I wanted a lower sugar recipe.  I knew that I could not use all Splenda if I wanted the same sort of consistency so that's why I opted only to sub in half.

TIP!  You can try using granulated stevia if you want to avoid artificial sweeteners. 

TIP!  Use thawed frozen berries instead of fresh.  Just measure them before you thaw them.

Let me know if you like jam or if you try this recipe in the comment section below.  


You might also like:
Strawberry Pretzel Salad
Strawberry Pie