In A Jam

It's strawberry season! I love strawberries. I love to bit into the sweet red bodies and slurp up the juice. Even the name is fun. So when my local coop offered 8 lbs of strawberries for a very low price, I decided to order them. What was I to do with them? I initially thought about freezing them for smoothies later, but then I checked my Freezer and I already have pounds of them in plastic bags and bins. Apparently I don't love smoothies as much as I thought. So what to do. Well, I recently took up canning (apparently twelve is not enough hobbies or my freezer is full of strawberries). So I decided to make some strawberry preserves. Easier said than done. You see although my cookbook collection numbers in the high double digits so I thought that would be easy. Yeah, no. After the first twenty cookbooks, I finally stumbled across one published by Women of the Farm Board. Strawberry preserves are 4 cups mashed strawberries, 6 cups sugar and a teaspoon Alum (added after cooking). I could do it. Except no one warned me that the contents would foam up and ooze over my pot, so I ended up with a very sticky cooktop. But the preserves tasted delicious. And I have 8 pints of them to last me until next year. Now to hid them from the kids:-)