Delighted to introduce guest blogger Marc Bowker from One Big Picture Photography. Today he shows us that jam making can be a boys game!
Strawberry jam. I love it. The kids love it. We all love it. So me and the kids thought we’d make our own. Just one small problem, we would need a lot of strawberries! Over two kilos of the things. Fortunately we live not so far away from a small farm where you can pick your own. So, off I went with my two little helpers and picked the biggest, reddest and juiciest strawberries we could find! It was great fun to do as a family and the kids had an absolute ball! The great thing about the farm is that it’s right next door to an airport and needless to say, every time a plane took off, the kids were mesmerised by this amazing spectacle. Now I’m no slave driver, but this seriously slowed us down. I’m thinking we might pick an off peak flight window next time we go!
So strawberry jam. We had never made it. How hard could it be? I was slightly sceptical about how it might turn out and had visions of me burning the pan or it just turning into a great big pile of gloop – a bit Willy Wonka chocolate style but with strawberry mush! Anyway, not long after beginning our little jam making experiment, my youngest got bored and decided to go and do something less boring instead – as in 30 seconds into the jam making process! Armed with my eldest oompa loompa and myself, the big responsible adult, we set about making the tastiest strawberry jam around.
Shock horror! The jam was made in less than half an hour pretty much and everything went to plan. And I’m not just saying this when I say that we’ve received rave reviews from extended parts of the family who were lucky enough to have tasted our amazing creation. Result!
This was the recipe we used: 2kg small ripe strawberries (we used the biggest we could find!), 1.7kg jam sugar (important it’s jam sugar) and the juice of two lemons (I cheated and used my trusty lemon juice, same thing you use to put on your pancakes) and that’s it, easy! This is the recipe we followed. Perfect.
Words and images Marc Bowker at One Big Picture Photography
