sweet black plum jam

Another of our favorite vendors at our primary farmers market is a man named Paul Zibritosky from Paul's Orchards. He usually has fruit and honey, and always lets us get a taste. I tasted my first golden plum from him this year!

We saw he had a good stash of sweet black plums and scooped them up to make jam. Yes, jam. I couldn't have cared less about jam until we started making our own, and now I want it pretty much all the time. I'm glad we have a substantial stash going now!

I always expect plums to be purple on the inside too, and I'm always surprised that they are yellow, even though I've been eating them since I was little.


When raw, the plums are purple and yellow. When you cook them down? Red!


Skim the foam, and into hot jars it goes.


The plum jam was the last item to fit on our first shelf. I had to do some serious rearranging and jam mingling to get the jars to fit, but it worked.

Notice the empty spot next to the shelves? I cleaned out the storage area in the basement to accomodate the arrival of a new old canning cabinet. It came in handy after the attack of the killer tomatoes that following week...

peach vanilla bean jam

We've mostly been sticking to the traditional jam recipes in the Blue Book this year, since we are novices. But we decided to try to add a little something to our peach jam to give it another flavor dimension -- vanilla bean.

We were able to peel the peaches with a peeler since they were firm enough to not bruise with the applied pressure.

You can add the pod as well as the seeds when you cook the jam down.

And of course the sugar that makes a jam a jam.


I have to say our dutch oven has been invaluable in making jam this year. I've always wanted a beautiful Le Crueset, but ever accurate and trustworthy Cooks Illustrated rated a $49.99 dutch oven by Tramontina at the exact same level as the Le Crueset that costs six times more. One of our top 5 kitchen purchases, hands down.


Sadly some of the vanilla beans get trapped in the foam that lays on the sides of the pan as it cooks down. Another important part of the jam that I should mention is the lemon juice. Sometimes canning recipes call specifically for bottled lemon juice and not fresh. This is because the citric acid in bottled lemon juice is more consistent than fresh lemons, which can vary. When your recipe's seal and safety depends on a specific amount of citric acid, it calls for bottled juice.



Next to the whole peaches we now have peach vanilla jam. One more type of jam to smush on these shelves...

blueberry lime jam

We made yet another variety of jam recently: blueberry lime. It had a really surprising flavor - something you wouldn't get from Welch's in the store, but it is delicious. Our amount of blueberries gave us about 6 half pints of jam. All fruit jams have an inordinate amount of sugar in them. (This one didn't have that whole container, just 5 cups. Which is a lot anyway.) This is the first recipe we canned using my grandma's jars.

cherry jam, or how my fingers turned purple for 4 days

We got some (relatively) local cherries a few weeks ago that I wanted to turn into jam (as our strawberry jam is disappearing fast!). Little did I know it would take an hour to pit them and that my fingers and nails would be purple for days. It was worth it, because it turned out great.

These cherries weren't as juicy as the strawberries we used for jam earlier in June, so they had to macerate for a bit under a giant pile of sugar.

Cat time out. Sometime I'll catch Maggie without a suspicious look on her face.


Actually, we had company over, so I didn't get a photo of the jam while it cooked. But when it was done, it looked something like this.

We got 8 half pint jars out of this batch. The shelf is really starting to fill out!