Our annual tradition of making jam on Labor Day continued in style, with a total of 30 jars of jam in 4 different flavors. In previous years we made jam based primarily on the blackberries we harvested from the walking trail near our house. This year, however, we branched out and made three other varieties using some store-bought fruit too.
This year’s jam varieties were blackberry/blueberry, strawberry/lemon, raspberry lemon-thyme and Hatch pepper jelly (which is delicious on brie, yum).
All are delicious, but my favorite is the raspberry lemon-thyme, a recipe we found on the extraordinarily beautiful blog Jules Food… (warning, do not go there when hungry as you are likely to damage your keyboard by drooling all over it).
Here are the recipes we used this year:
- Blackberry/blueberry – a combination of blueberries and blackberries following the basic berry jam recipe we used last year (which is pretty much the same as the Ball recipe).
- Strawberry lemon – add finely grated zest of one lemon to the basic strawberry jam recipe from Ball.
- Hatch pepper jelly – use the recipe from ebjams and removed the seeds from half of the peppers to have it not be too hot, we wish we had left them all in.
- Raspberry Lemon Thyme – we didn’t have enough raspberries, so we had about 40% strawberries in our jam following the excellent recipe from food photographer and blogger, Jules (potentially ghost written by Lil’ Ruby).
Next up, we have a big bag of blueberries just waiting to be turned into blueberry lemon basil jam.