Full Speed Ahead (Recipes Included)

I cannot…
believe…
we are nearing the end of June.

Why on earth is this summer so busy?  We are so busy every single day.  I scheduled swimming lessons for the kids this week (private ones…long and very boring story).  The teacher called to reschedule the days, and I said, sure, we have nothing going on.  Then I realized that I had scheduled one of them on a very important birthday for my eldest child at the end of this week.  We just finished celebrating Knut’s birthday, then Father’s Day, and now we have another birthday.  We are on a perpetual cake high.

I’d like the give a huge thank you to those who participated in the I’m Blessed post yesterday.  That was really fun for me.  I didn’t get a chance to leave a comment on all the blogs that linked up, but my brother has been staying with us and I’m trying to not completely ignore him for the laptop.  I hope to finish commenting today.  If you haven’t read all the other posts, you really should.

So, my brother is leaving today and headed back to Cali.  We made a lot of jams and jellies.  He’s taking most of them with him to give to drooling family members of ours all over the country.  I’ve learned the hard way that giving a jar of jam to a farm wife doesn’t have the awe and wonder of giving jam to a city-dweller.  I can use 2 jars tied together as a Christmas present filled with delightful “oohs” and “aahs” that fill the room, but if you give that up here people don’t give quite the same response.  Well, except me.  I used to be a city-dweller, so sights like this still fill me with awe:

(Jeremy got these fancy little jars to give out as gifts.  The big ones in the back are mine…and I’m keeping them.)  Although, I normally make this much jam…and maybe more for just my family.  So the preserving job of the summer has just begun in this household.

We started out with making my Great-Auntie Signe’s recipe for “rhubarb jam” which I had found a few years back in our family cookbook.  My brother Jeremy and I have renamed it to “Minnesota Summer.”  Recipe follows:

Minnesota Summer Jam
5 cups of rhubarb diced
1 cup of water
5 cups of sugar
1 can of blueberry pie filling
2 packages of any red jello (I always use strawberry and it’s amazing)

Cook the rhubarb and water until soft.  Add the sugar and pie filling and cook at a boil for 6 minutes, stirring constantly.  Remove from heat and add 2 packages of jello.  Ladle into sterilized jars, seal and give it a 10 minute boiling water bath for good measure.  Makes about 4 pints.   

Do not double jam/jelly recipes ever.  Or so I’m told.  Make it in batches and save yourself sorrow.

This jam does make homemade yogurt disappear twice as fast.  Fair warning.

This is Knut and my favorite jam but I don’t often make a lot of it, because it’s the most expensive jam recipe I have because of the blueberry pie filling.  It adds a few dollars to the cost of the project, although not enough to make it as expensive as store bought jam.

At the end of the day we cut up the rest of the rhubarb that we picked, placed it in a big pot, covered it with water, let it boil for awhile until it was pretty soft, strained it and stuck the “rhubarb juice” in the fridge until we had time to get to it again on Monday.  We used Knut’s mom’s recipe for Rhubarb jelly, and it’s such a pretty pink jelly.

Rhubarb Jelly

3 1/2 cups of rhubarb juice
1 package of pectin
5 cups of sugar
optional 1 T strawberry jello for color (I rarely do this, but it might depend on the coloring of rhubarb you have)
1/2 tsp (I don’t measure) butter to help with the foam

Pour juice, pectin and butter into pot.  Bring to a full boil stirring constantly.  Add all 5 cups of sugar at once.  Stir and bring it back to a full boil.  Boil hard for exactly 1 minute.  Remove from the stove and let it sit for about 1 minute to let a “skin” of foam set so that the “jam scum” as Knut calls it can be removed easily.  (Jam scum is really popular on homemade bread at our house.)  Ladle into sterilized jars and follow normal method on the pectin box (again…water bath for 10 minutes.)

If you don’t know the regular canning process, most pectin boxes come with very detailed instructions inside, so don’t worry.