I Feel Like This Makes Me a Big Kid

I had a long list of posts to write about last night. 

Naturally they are all gone because I didn’t have a piece of paper within arm’s reach at the time.

Today’s Exploit:

I was very brave today.

I did something that I have never done alone before.

It was a big step for me in my kitchen experimentationalism, or something.

Anyway.

The thing I did.

I did it by myself.

For the first time ever.

I canned!

They sealed and everything, on the first try!

That was somewhat less exciting than I had hoped.

But the canning was not.

Yesterday I stopped at a truck on the side of the road with H. to buy some strawberries.  I don’t know if I have mentioned it before, but I live rather near the strawberry capital of Texas, and they make sure you know it.  They have a water tower painted like a strawberry, a huge sign saying “Home of the Strawberry Festival” and everything is painted green and red.  Everything.

So I got a flat of Poteet strawberries.  That’s a lot of strawberries.

I helped Tammy make some jam once, and I helped my dad make some syrup a few times, but I never did it by myself, and I was never in charge. 

So I looked up a recipe for Strawberry Preserves, disregarded it, and looked up instructions on what to do with the jars to make them seal.  

Then I gave up on recipes and tried to remember what we did to make syrup.

I didn’t have any dish washing gloves, that was a major setback. But I got some cool silicone tongs to make up for it.

I hulled 4 pints of the strawberries with my spring-loaded-super-duper-strawberry-huller from Aunt Sarah, and then I sliced them with my extra-sharp-and-kinda-scary-strawberry-chopper/slicer from Cupcake.

It took me about 20.462 minutes to do a million strawberries.

Then I added some sugar and left it to sit overnight in the fridge. 

Today I got out my steamer to my BIG pot, that I magically saved, and put my jars in it, and put my strawberries in my other pot to simmer.

When the jars were hot and the strawberry juice was no longer opaque I used my antique ladle, because it’s the only one I have, to add the preserves to the jars.  I sealed them and turned them upside down on a white towel, because that’s what Tammy did, and because I only have white towels. 

I waited and waited for them to pop to mean that they were sealed, but they never did.  So I checked and they were sealed, they just didn’t do the fun part. 

And now I have 6 jars of home-grown strawberry preserves, that may turn out to be strawberry syrup, but that’s ok because I made it.

By myself.

Aren't they pretty strawberries? They were the small ones, and therefore less expensive, but it also meant I got more of them. Yay