Violet Jam

A boy in the grass picking flowers

June is a jam month for the Food in Jars Mastery Challenge and I need to be honest, I really wanted to challenge myself and jam was a hard one to find. Jam is my THING.... how could I take it up a notch?

Then I remembered that we had violets growing at the edge of the woods.  FLOWERS .... I could challenge myself by using flowers. It was a wonderful Sunday morning activity. With the help of Baby, we went foraging in the field for violets.
 
























It was an ideal Sunday morning, drinking my tea, sitting in the shady grass with my youngest picking flowers.

I need to be honest here though one cup of packed violets is a hard earned venture, even Baby bagged out before I got them all. They almost camouflage themselves among the grass - you can only see them when you look at them from the right direction.

I love the swirl in the leaves. 

All in all, it took over an hour to procure one cup of violets but luckily that is all I needed because I picked every last one of them.

I used a recipe from  Soule Mama found HERE.  

I don't know if I did it right or used the right amount of pectin because my jam isn't as purple as hers. It also seems to have a grainy consistency. I would definitely make this again, but I might use natural pectin from apples. This was a nice experiment in foraging and I will tinker with it again. How many rounds of blooms do violets have in a season?

I Tweezed out any impurities

Ingredients

1 (packed) cup violet blossoms
1 cup water
juice of one lemon
1/2 cup honey
pectin (I used 1/3 of a box of Pomona pectin - turns out that 1/3 is 1 Tablespoon and 1 Teaspoon.)

Process

1. Spend a lovely late spring morning with your youngest child foraging for violets. 

2.  Blend violets, 1/2 of the water and lemon juice.

3.  Heat remaining water and honey in a saucepan. 

4. When warm, add pectin and stir until mixed well. 

5. Add pectin/honey mix to blender. Blend again until smooth. 

6. Place in hot jars immediately to set. This is a freezer jam for preserving.

Saving Tomatillos

I put these into the freezer last night in hopes of salsas to come.























I really hope that the tomatillos stay purple when I finally make them into salsa!

Kevin is home and in the freezer

That's a lot of pork!!

Out with the old and in with the new...

This is baby food that was just evicted from our freezer. This baby food is over 4 years old. Why have we kept it so long? Maybe because it was the last vestige of our beloved the Dairy Queen and Queen Lactina.
Our baby starts Kindergarten with in two weeks, and there is no better way to get ready for months of lunchboxes x 3 than to can!

So...

Out with the baby food and in with the blueberry jam! We are blessed!

Restore Organic Law

My trip to the farmers market this weekend yielded three wonderful pints of organic wild blueberries. I promptly vacuum sealed them and put them in my freezer, for a winter full of yummy berry dishes for the family. Each quart of blueberries came with a sticker on it that identified that they were certified organic by MOFGA, picked on Arthur Harvey's blueberry farm in Hartford Maine, and packaged by Betsy’s of Maine. But the most interesting tidbit on the small sticker was the link to this website where I discovered the danger organic standards are in. In essence, lobbyists allowed the inclusion of non-organic substances to be allowed into foods that can still be labeled as organic. Harvey, a 72-year-old organic blueberry farmer and inspector, then sued Agriculture Secretary, alleging that the National Organic Program was overstepping the bounds of the Organic Foods Production Act. This change in the standards of organic foods and processing, "is to allow synthetic ingredients in manufacturing foods to be labeled organic. Prior to this change the words quoted above served as a firewall for organic products, preventing the addition of synthetics. But now, only the discretion of USDA will determine which synthetics are used---mostly without being named on the labels." If you are interested in preserving the purity of organic foods, please go to the website and see what you can do to help. A sample letter that you can send to law makers can be found here. Another website to visit is Organic Consumers. One thing I know for sure, I am proud of who and where my blueberries came from!