Farmer's Market

The Farmer's Market in our small town officially opened for the season today.

After a few quiet days at home Baxter was ready to hit the town so he opted to come along with McKayla, Taylor and I to the market.

Our Farmer's Market is pretty small compared to some but it is early in the season and not all of the vendors have started coming yet.  Also, next month they are planning to build a permanent structure to house the Farmer's Market in as well. I am looking forward to that!

We purchased some fresh baked items to snack on... a rhubarb tart for me, oatmeal raisin cookies for McKayla and Baxter chose chocolate chip cookies... Yummy!

I picked up a few plant starts for the garden... a purple tomato, thyme, dill and oregano.  Then Baxter spotted these huge fresh picked strawberries!  It didn't take much convincing for me to buy 4 quarts of them.  We ate a few right in the parking lot, the rest I hid away until we got home so we could make strawberry jam with them.

We made Freezer Jam today because it is fast and easy as it doesn't require any cooking.  First I cleaned and sliced the strawberries up to equal 8 cups tightly packed berries.

Then we added in a package of Freezer Jam Fruit Pectin (this is different then the pectin for cooked jam).  Pectin is what makes your jam (with fruit chunks) or jelly (pureed smooth) get thick and spreadable.  It is naturally in many fruits but adding additional pectin helps achieve a thicker result.

The strawberries and pectin are mixed together really well to a consistency that you like.  At this point Baxter wanted to go swimming in the mixture it smelled so good!

Finally, after letting it set for about 30 minutes we spooned the jam into freezer containers (our batch made 11 half pint jars) and store in the freezer up to a year.  Not only is this great jam for sandwiches it is also great over ice cream and makes a wonderful stir-in for plain yogurt too!