Like I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been staying at my parents’ house trying to keep myself busy. It’s strange being back in town for such an in-between amount of time. I used to live in the dorms at school, so every summer and winter break I’d live here and work. Now that I live full-time in Oakland, however, I find myself feeling very in-between during these brief visits. It’s not long enough to work, but not short enough to feel rushed. Instead I watch too much tv, pray for the sun to come out, and ruin my sleep cycle.
When I’m home, my mom and I catch each other up on our latest food obsessions (foodsessions?), whether it be her margarita cupcakes or something strange that I pickled. Anyway, there’s a very cool store in town called Happy Girl Kitchen Co. that has lots of lovely pickled and fermented and jar-ed local produce, and my mom told me about a big flat of berries that she wanted to buy from them. So a few days after she made the order, I went by the store and picked up a bright bunch of strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries.
A day later, and after some serious mashing and simmering, we had six jars of some delectable mixed berry jam. I used the Happy Girl Kitchen recipe that they sent my mom via email, so I’m not going to reproduce it in full here. It was basically a very simple process: Mix all the berries (washed and de-stemmed) in a big bowl with 4 cups of sugar and the juice of two lemons, let that all sit overnight, and then the next morning mash it all together and simmer on the stove until the jam gels. Tada! We didn’t use any extra pectin, but had we the jam would probably be a little more like smackers jam and a little less preserve-ey. I like it this way, though, and can’t help but mix it in with yogurt and slather it on any bread I can get my hands on. A perfect companion for all of that tv-watching I’ve been doing…
The Drunk Squash