Strawberry Sessions: Freezer Jam

I would first like to say that this strawberry session was a total FAIL!  Quite disappointing considering I used up 8 cups of strawberries for nothing, but I will take it as a lesson learned and so should you!

On Tuesday, Ally, Finley and I went to a local farm in town with some friends to pick strawberries.  It's really neat.  They take you on a tractor out to their strawberry fields and let you pick as many strawberries as you want.  They charge $1.45 a pound, which seems like a deal to me!  There were good pickings, because we went home with 11 lbs of red, juicy strawberries.

What to do with all these strawberries??? Hence the strawberry sessions!  First, we made freezer jam.  I was looking through recipes and they all called for pectin, which I did not have at home (and was too lazy to go to the store to get), so I found the one recipe that I had everything of at home.  The recipe was from The Big Book of Preserving The Harvest.  Recipe: Bake Low-Sugar Strawberry Jam. 

I will show you what I did, but I'm not going to go into huge detail... I mean, the jam came out a fail so what's the point?!

First I cut the strawberries in half and combined them with the remaining ingredients (sugar, lemon juice) in a 2 quart dish.

The recipe says to bake at 325 for 1-1.5 hours.  If it isn't gelled up enough, bake for another 45 minutes.  Well, mine baked for  2.5 hours and this is what it looked like:

It was still runny as all get out, but I thought for sure I had baked it long enough.  So I put them in jelly jars.

Oh, and another thing.  The recipe says you will get 3.5 pint jars.  I got 2.5.  ::grumble::  I'm not liking this recipe one bit.

I took out my half jar today to try on some toast.

Was the flavor okay?  yes.  Was it amazing?  absolutely not.
But it was soooooo runny that it ended up making my toast really soggy.  Yuck!

So lesson learned, folks, NEVER use this recipe and ALWAYS get off your lazy ass and buy some pectin.
 
Your welcome! :)

P.S.  More lessons learned to come-  Fruit Leather for sure.  I'm glad (kind of) that my errors in the kitchen can aid in your success!