We're Jammin'

Minnesota summers usually last 3 days, and sometimes when we're lucky, those days are warm too. Here is a normal schedule for the summer days:
Day-1: Pack winter clothes away. Wear shorter/fewer clothes and try your best to sweat it out under the sun, which may be behind cloud-cover.
Day-2: pick strawberries if not destroyed by hail/rain. Dip a toe in the pool.
Day-3: Quickly complain about the heat before unpacking winter clothes again.

This year, El Sol - the only real star in our vicinity - showed up only intermittently at our spring coming-out parties. It wouldn't have mattered except he was supposed to bring crucial ingredients for spring - warmth and sunshine. Without these, everything got pushed back a bit - including planting and growing of our staple foods - delicious berries.

But finally, on Fathers' Day, our local strawberry patch opened up for picking. We joined the throngs of parents desperate to show their kids that strawberries grow on plants and without any plastic container around them. The growers had been kind enough to arrange for tractor trolleys for hauling us from the parking, through manure scented slushy dirt road to the patch. There was some jostling and rushing to get on the trolley before people's decency trumped their desire to meet the strawberries and they stood back with the smug realization
"this isn't the last trolley leaving for the patch .... Or is it?!!!"

Despite superb organization by two young ladies who assigned rows to pickers, there was some confusion- due to the few people who were in a real rush to get through it, fill a basket and then probably post from the comfort of their cars about the experience in great detail not exceeding 140 characters. While cutting across rows, picking randomly they yelled out "We're done!", "Timmy, pose for a picture - great!", "We're leaving". One got the general idea that they weren't exactly too much into it.

Our picking by contrast lasted long enough for our kids to complain about the sun on their backs, an education on how "thistles don't grow strawberries" from a gentleman picking next to us, some pictures, a basket full of delicious juicy strawberries and a larger amount already ingested until we couldn't possibly eat another.

The berries we had picked (or had they picked us?) beamed and gave us rather inviting looks all the way to the car and during the drive home. By evening however, all their ardor was gone and they just wanted to rest in a cool, dark place - the refrigerator. Little did they know that their destiny involved a longer shelf life - in other words they were about to get into a real jam (pun intended).

As per the wise-fool we all know - the interweb - strawberry jam is simple enough - mix strawberries+sugar+lemon juice, apply heat and um, stir occasionally. We picked a simple recipe by the venerable Ina Garten of Food Network. But wiser and curioser souls than us had already traveled that path and raised questions about 'setting the jam' and 'amount of sugar', use pectin or ask the berries to BYO. And to say nothing about the arcane art of canning the final product so that it stays safe for posterity ... at least until the next week.
Instead of letting these concerns deter us, we decided to soldier on. Tweaking the original recipe (1.5 pint berries+2 cups sugar+1 lemon + 30 min of your life)
To
1.5 cups of sugar
2 pints (=4 cups) crushed strawberries (all their hopes dashed)
Juice of 1.5 lemons
We started by mixing the sweet (sugar) with the sour (lemon juice) and showing it some warmth on the stove for a few minutes. Add the crushed berries and brought it close to a boil on medium heat then lowering the heat let it simmer for a while. The berries in the pan often let their emotions bubble up, but then who likes to get out of the sun and into a pan. At this point I would like to warn the reader - when a recipe promises to be done in 30 minutes - it might be taking liberties with the truth to some degree. About 90 minutes later the contents of the pan looked something that vaguely resembled the third cousin, twice-removed of a strawberry jam.
By now, our food critics had retired for the night. So, next morning, with some trepidation we presented the finished product on two slices of bread to our two critics and waited with bated breath. Our joy knew no bounds when we got two thumbs up!!

Word in the fridge is, the berries in their new avatar aren't entirely disappointed either.