Spread the Love

What do you get when you mix 30 pounds of rhubarb

and 30 pounds of strawberries

with 24 pounds of sugar and the juice from 36 lemon?

You cook it all up in copper jam pots

and you end up with 900 ounces of Strawberry Rhubarb Jam.

The 3.75 ounce jars will be the table favor at our son's September wedding.

We kind of over estimated how much we needed {after the 180 jars we need for the wedding}, so we ended up with another 22 jars, of various sizes, to share with family and friends. I used every canning jar I had, smaller than a quart. So there are jars of jam from 4 ounces to 24 ounces. It will last a long while in my "jam closet".

For the large jars I used chalk board contact paper to make the labels. I love these labels. They are so easy to make. You just buy chalk friendly contact paper and a fancy punch (think scrapbook punch) and then you can write on them with a chalk pen.

We still need to shine up the wedding favor jars and add a label. I don't know if it's our hard water or the reaction of the jars in the canning pot, but I get a dusty deposit on the jars. It's nothing that a little elbow grease can't remove. That's our job for another day.
This was a fun day with my son and future daughter-in-law. Evan, who is an Executive Sous Chef at a fine dining restaurant, helped us to get started by chopping most of the rhubarb. Then he went to hit golf balls while Lauren and I stirred and chopped some more. Lauren helped with the rhubarb, while I cleaned all the strawberries. We spent 7 hours prepping and making the jam. I was able to get about 60 jars canned after they left. The next day I spent another 3 hours canning the rest of the jam. Only 51 more days until the wedding!

 "Spread the Love"