Strawberry Jam, Anyone?

So Adam and I got ambitious last week and decided to pick strawberries. We went with our friend Brianna and her baby girl to Twedt's Farms and labored strawberry picking for 2 1/2 hours on Thursday morning. Little did we know (Have you seen Stranger than Fiction? Well I have, and every time someone, including me, says "Little did he know," it makes me laugh. I hope you laugh too. If no, go see Stranger than Fiction because it's really funny.)

Anyway. Little did we know how effective our strawberry picking would be. We ended up with 18 pounds of strawberries! Yes, I said 18 pounds! And it only cost us 13 dollars! That's not including the opportunity cost of course, and I certainly know that if I had a good job, it would not be worth my while to pick strawberries at all when I could be earning much more than the money we saved by not buying these strawberries at the store. However, I am now a stay-at-home mom and I earn nothing, so it was definitely worth while. And in case you are wondering, yes, Lily did try desperately to eat the strawberries right out of the bucket almost the whole time. I mostly succeeded in preventing this.

With 18 pounds of super-ripe strawberries overflowing all over our kitchen, I had to make jam pronto in order to keep them from rotting. I used up every canning jar in the house and an entire bucket of sugar, even though I made low-sugar jam! I ended up with 5 quarts and 14 pints of jam, which comes out to 3 gallons! Here is the resulting state of my freezer:

I guess I will be making cooked jam when raspberry season rolls around.

After all this, I still had enough strawberries to make a large strawberry pie and cram two bags of whole strawberries into the door of the freezer.

If you come visit me, I will give you some strawberry jam . . .  :)