Tuesday, March 30, 2010

How to Make Home-Made Strawberry Preserves

It is strawberry week in the FoodWhore household.  Last week a local agricultural club was selling strawberries, and we bought two flats. Holy cow, that's a lot of berries. We litterally had a sink-full of 'em.
 (Don't let the picture fool you . . . they were like six layers deep, and that was after we'd eaten a couple pints!)

So, of course we had to do something with all of those berries. We definitely did not want to let them rot.  So we bagged a bunch in the freezer for smoothies. We made strawberry pancakes. We've had heaping cups of strawberries on our cereal each morning. We eat them just straight out of the fridge. We are going to be berried out by the end of this!

Today, I tried something new. I made strawberry preserves for the first time.  Mr. FoodWhore loves PB&Js, but I'm looking forward to making french toast and slathering it with home-made preserves, yum!
I've never made preserves before, but I followed the directions found here.

It seemed easy enough, but it was a bit sticky. I would suggest having a cup of water to put your sugary utensils in. I started to lay them on the counter, but then that got messy. Then I used a paper towel, but the spoon kept sticking to it. The kitchen was a sugary mess when I was done. 

I haven't tried it yet, but it sure smells good. I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out.  Here's a few pictures from my efforts.
boiling sugar

strawberries cooking down

not sure why, but it said to cool the jars upside down

Makes about 4 cups; Preserves have approximately 40 calories per tablespoon.

Bon Appetit!
The FoodWhore

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Hope it turns out good! It sounds so yummy! Did you have a lot of weird-shaped strawberries? It seems like every container I buy has the most odd-shaped ones!

Alison said...

Yeah, there were some that looked like 3 or 4 had merged into one big berry.