this is not an exit

if people actually knew how easy it is to make fruit jam, i wonder if they would ever bother buying the junk that you get at the store.

i wouldn’t say that my family has ever been all that healthy or homemade about our foods, though i do recall that when i was growing up that we didn’t eat a whole lot of processed or prepackaged food. i don’t remember having bags of cookies or bags of chips in the house. sometimes my mom would haul chold and i into the kitchen and let us help her make chocolate chip cookies or whatnot. tollhouse chip cookies were as close as we got to junk food.

we weren’t allowed to eat sugary cereals, pop tarts, pizza pops, fruit roll ups, or any such fad food.

we always had both strawberry and raspberry jam at home - and it was always made by my mom. the super cool thing was that my mom would take us out to abbotsford or chilliwack and chold and i would get dressed up in grungy clothes and be allowed to help pick the berries. there are some photos floating around of he and i with smushed fruit/ fruit juice down the front of our shirts and sand/ dirt stuck to the stains because we had been mucking around on the ground and eating fruit all day. i clearly remember eating one berry for each berry i put in the picking bucket.

mom would bring us home and wash us off before she would get to work making jams.

today i took L out to chilliwack to see a used motorbike that he was interested in and then we went on a wild goose chase for a strawberry farm that didn’t exist. after much driving and some grumpiness we arrived at an amazing U-Pick farm. $1 per pound of strawberries. w00t!

i thought that everyone got to go and pick berries when they were a kid, but L informed me that this is not so. this was his first time picking fruit and i was glad to be the one to pop his strawberry.

in about 30 min we picked 10.25 pounds of berries. yum.

having not picked berries before, L had also never made freezer jam. it is simple as pie. in about an hour we made enough strawberry jam to last my household for the next 2 years. we have already made plans to make apple-blueberry jam when the season arrives.

the moral of the story is that there are tasty strawberries and also tasty strawberry jam at my house.

the end.