I Was At It Again...

The day began with my trusty sidekick sleeping on my foot as I perused some of my canning cookbooks. She opened her eyes when Handsome stopped to take this picture. Once I decided what I was going to do, she had to relocate so I could move. She did keep my foot warm for a while, though.

I grabbed my trusty British Kilner pot and put all my thawed strawberries into it. I didn't drain off the liquid, which would come back to bite me later. sigh

This is what I took out of the water bath...fourteen beautiful jars of strawberry jam...that wouldn't set up. I went back to my books to learn that it was probably because of all that liquid I retained with the berries.

As I didn't need fourteen jars of ice cream topping (what I do with runny jam), I decided to redo them, adding another package of Certo to the pot - and removing some of the liquid from each jar as I poured it back into my by-then clean pot. After all was said and done, I had eleven half-pint jars of jam. Good enough!

 

 

I did a little rearranging in the end pantry cabinets. I still have space for the hickory syrup, which I didn't do yesterday. Perhaps I'll get to that this morning. I work from 4-10 pm today, standing in for someone else, so I'll have my morning tea and see how I feel. I might stitch on the corgi brooch for a while instead.

Yes, those are eggs on the bottom shelf. They still have the bloom to protect them, so they needn't be refrigerated. Behind the divider is my large jar of water glassed eggs, too. Still saving those for a rainy day. 

I have thirteen or fourteen gallon-size ziplocs of beautiful Roma tomatoes in the freezer. (Did you know that frozen tomatoes sound like billiard balls when they knock together? Yep.) Those will become homemade Rotel™, homemade pizza sauce, and stewed tomatoes. I'll do those soon, too, to free up space in the freezer, as well as refill the pantry until the vegetable garden yields in late summer/early fall. I still have to get the beds ready for planting. That won't be for a couple weeks, unless I can steal an hour here or there before then.

 

It's going to be a busy spring, for sure. The weather is gorgeous these days, so I want to get as much done inside as possible, to be able to spend more free time outdoors. It was a relatively mild, but long winter and I'm anxious to enjoy our Wisconsin spring and summer. Alas, it will be over far too soon.