Oregon Berries!

June is strawberry season for us. Every year I go out with my kiddos and pick buckets of strawberries. My boys were so helpful this year. They picked beautiful big red strawberries and filled several buckets for me. This made strawberry picking last only 1 hr and 20 min instead of the 2 or 3 hrs it has taken in the past. Don't these berries look delicious? 

 We pick about 25-30 lbs and make homemade strawberry freezer jam with all but about 4 lbs. The left over strawberries I flash freeze for smoothies and cake toppings throughout the year. 

 For the Jam I wash and core the strawberries.

 Then I place them in my blender or food processor if you have one. 

  Then I blend them up.

 I like to use Ball real fruit pectin for my freezer jam. It calls for less sugar then most recipes and I like that I can taste the strawberries instead of just sugar. Oregon strawberries are very flavorful so you don't need a lot of sugar to sweeten them. This bottle of pectin is called a flex batch which was all I could find. They don't seem to be selling the pectin in separate packages anymore.  

 After blending my strawberries I add 4 cups berries to 1 1/2 cups sugar and the allotted amount of pectin per batch and mix it together thoroughly. I then pour it into quart freezer bags and stack them in my freezer.   

And Wala...delicious strawberry freezer jam to last all year long. We put this on everything from waffles and pancakes to ice cream, cakes and crepes. Yummy!