If You Want the Best Jam in the Land, You Gotta Make Your Own

"If you want the best jam in the land, you gotta make your own." This is the chorus to a song I first heard in my living room when our friend, Kylee, sang it to our kids as she played the guitar. Later I learned that Michelle Shocked sings it and if I can ever figure out how to add music to this blog of mine, I'll add the song to this post some day.

At the tail end of July, I got a call from my good friend Tiffany. Here's how the call went:

Tiffany (in her always enthusiastic tone): Angie! They have 25 lb. boxes of apricots at Farmer's Market for THREE dollars!!

Me (wondering why this is such exciting news): Sounds like a good deal for you...

Tiffany: NO! You don't understand! It's a GREAT deal! Go over and buy a box and we'll make jam!

Me: Tiff, I don't know how to make JAM!

Tiffany: That's okay! I'll show you. Go buy a box if you're in. (Click. She hangs up.)

The next thing I know, I'm forking out my 3 bucks for a very heavy box of apricots. I had committed myself to a day of jam making.

Early the next Friday morning, Tiffany shows up at my front door wearing the frilliest apron you've ever seen. It had ruffles like that of a can-can girl and this can-can girl had more canning supplies with her than she had ruffles in her apron. Our six kids got all kinds of busy playing and I put on my apron (not nearly as fancy as Tiffany's) so that Tiffany and I could get all kinds of busy with this project of ours:

First, we sterilized all our jars:


Then we made some tactical errors that cost us nothing but time until we consulted the directions in the boxes of pectin. Then, we got busy cooking down the apricots with pectin and more sugar than I feel comfortable admitting to in print:

We stirred and stirred the dreamy concoction until it was time to can it up with help from some of our six kids. Meagan was especially fond of jarring up the jam:

We experimented a bit trying reduce the rediculous amount of sugar and blending the mixture for a different texture. So, every batch of jam was a little different from the next. We joked that we should wait and label the jars after all was said and done. Some were best labeled "syrup", others "chutney", others "sauce" and still others the "jam" it was intended to be. Call it what you want, but we were pretty darn proud of all these jars:

This project, with the "help" of the six kids took all day long. And we never did get to the second box of apricots. That box would spend the day with Tiffany alone in her kitchen where she would try some new experiments like adding pineapple to the concoction, yum! As we spent the day together, we sustained ourselves on laughter and stories of our grandmothers who were champion canners.

Tiffany told me stories of her memories of canning with her mom and grandma and how they'd tap quickly on all the jars insuring that they were all safely sealed. I told Tiffany about how my grandma traveled with jars of pickles in her suitcase because she never wanted to disappoint my dad, her son-in-law, who anxiously awaited her signature pickles when she and my grandpa would come visit us.

We took another look at all our jars and decided we should be photographed with the result of a day's labor:

How could we have not gotten Tiffany's can-can apron in the picture?!

We really were quite proud. Then Tiffany brought us back down to earth when she said, "You know what, Angie, I was reading my grandma's journal once about how she made 4 bushels of fruit into jam. That's like 4 times what we just made and she did it all by 10 a.m., I'm sure of it! We're not really as cool as we think we are."

Still, we decided we were cool enough to enter our jam in the county fair. On Friday night, we went to the fair to take part in some good county fair fun and to view all the entries, and guess what??!

It turns out we made the best jam in the land.

Here are some other ribbon winners at the county fair:

Meagan's Sunflower Photograph-White Ribbon


James' Horse Painting-Red Ribbon


Charlie's finger painting - white ribbon