Thursday 15 January 2015

Hey there!

So this blog was supposed to be prettiness and sharing my Project Life layouts by now, but after some drama with the scrapbooking crew, it has somewhat zapped any creativity I had. There has been no scrapbooking done at all! I have been taking lots of photos though, so hopefully the creativity will come back, maybe one day!

I have been studying a lot at the moment, trying to catch up a little. I don't feel so bad after speaking to my tutor, who has assured me that the 12 month time frame set by the college is unrealistic for distance students. Whilst I do feel better about that, I still feel weird knowing that I wont be finished in the initially designated time frame - that's the perfectionist in me I guess.

We are in the midst if getting started with school planning. DS is 12 and about to go off to high school and DD is home-schooling this year, which I am both excited and terrified about. We need to start organising curriculum for her soon, so that she can start on the same day as the school year begins. I am not sure if we will continue to follow regular school sessions but that's the beauty of this I guess, we can adapt it to suit her needs. It will be an interesting year, that's for sure!

Since the new year started we have been doing lots of cooking, and attempted Strawberry Jam this week, with the strawberries that we had frozen from our strawberry picking adventure in December. We came home from visiting with my mum to find that the freezer had crapped itself and all the food in the top half had begun to defrost. Ergh! With the weather the way it has been, it couldn't have happened at a worse time. So we salvaged what we could, and used the money I had put aside for the dentist next month to buy a new chest freezer. With the way DS eats these days we just cant afford to not have the deep freeze, or we would be shopping every second day, and we all know how good that is for the budget!

Anyway, so we made Strawberry Jam. I am not a huge fan of jams, they are usually a bit too sweet for me, so making our own meant I could tweek things a little. This is the recipe we went with;

Strawberry Jam

2.5 kg frozen chopped strawberries
1 cup raw sugar
1 cup granulated Splenda
1 lemon, zest and juice
1 packet Jamsetta with Pectin

Directions

Add strawberries to a large pot. let them stew a little and break down over a medium heat, stirring regularly. Add sugar and mix thoroughly, then do the same with the splenda. (At this stage it became pretty thin and runny, which is why we decided to add the Jamsetta). Add the zest of the lemon and then juice. Take some of the liquid from the pot (about 2 cups) and thoroughly mix in the Jamsetta. Then add this delicious goopy mess into the still hot jam mixture, stir well and allow to cool just enough that its able to be handled.

We followed basic canning procedure here with sterilised jars and filled 6 large Ball Mason jars with the hot mixture. So it was quite a lot of jam!

NOTE - the Splenda use makes quite a soft set jam, even with the addition of the Jamsetta. If you know anything about making jams, you would probably realise that the amount of sugar we added was very little! You can tweek this to your own taste, but we love that it is a little tart and tangy from the lemon juice. If you have some pointers, I'd love to hear in the comments!



The result - gorgeous sticky yummy strawberry jam!

We made Lemonade Scones today and trialled our jam - I think its pretty safe to call this one a success. Everyone pigged out and then complained about how full they were but that it was so good they couldn't stop eating!

Thanks for reading :)