When I think of strawberries I picture:
1. Straw hats and checkered shirts;
2. Cloudy-haired Edward in "Pretty Woman" calling room service to order strawberries & champagne;
3. Deana Carter's song that tells the story of a girl making love to a college boy under the hot July moon.
I love berries, and as dumb as it may sound, I think my taste was greatly influenced by a picture book called "Jamberry" that I owned as a kid. The book had a bunch of catchy rhymes of this sort:
Under the bridge
And over the dam
Looking for berries
Berries for jam
Which made it fun to read out loud over and over again.
Berries are such fun snacks.
Bite sized, hassle-free, citrus bursts.
:-)
But if I had to live with only one type of berries, these would unquestionably be strawberries.
You know how there is a teeny empty space at the core of a strawberry?
I feel that's where the appeal lies... that's where the wave of fresh breeziness that you get when you bite into a strawberry comes from. And this is transformed into an echo you feel againsts the walls of your senses (not as an after taste but as if a half-beated hum) when eating strawberry icecream or any other product made of strawberries.
I was never very fond of jellies and jams.
As a kid I got irritated when my mama put jam on my buttered toast- I could eat butter on toast but jam and bread never made real sense until just recently.
For the last few months, I've been frequenting a cafe that's a few blocks from my workplace. I'm drawn like a magnet to everything strawberry flavoured on their menu, especially their unchangingly delicious choux pastry that hides layers of sliced strawberries under a generous blop of mildly sweetened whipped cream: it's literally how cloud nine would taste.
But,
What kept me thinking of strawberries was their strawberry jam. I didn't ask if they made it themselves but it tasted like Christmas, it tasted like something that'd make a great duet with churned butter, it tasted like the country side.
After three consecutive mornings eating their delicious bread and strawberry jam- I thought- that's it! I have to
make my own jam,
my own berry jam,
my own strawberry jam.
So I got out the heaviest and trustiest pot we own, to which I added a 1:1 proportion of strawberries : unrefined whole cane sugar, and on low heat I let the sugar dissolve and the strawberry soften and lose their shape. Around 20 minutes having gone by, I used a potato masher to clumsily mash up the strawberries so as to leave "accidental" chunky bits. I let it reduce, constantly looking into it until the consistency felt gloppy, and then turned off the heat, added a squeeze of a lemon and let it cool down on the kitchen counter, before filling as many sterilized jars possible with this yumminess.
So I got out the heaviest and trustiest pot we own, to which I added a 1:1 proportion of strawberries : unrefined whole cane sugar, and on low heat I let the sugar dissolve and the strawberry soften and lose their shape. Around 20 minutes having gone by, I used a potato masher to clumsily mash up the strawberries so as to leave "accidental" chunky bits. I let it reduce, constantly looking into it until the consistency felt gloppy, and then turned off the heat, added a squeeze of a lemon and let it cool down on the kitchen counter, before filling as many sterilized jars possible with this yumminess.
Hoping this inspires you to pamper yourself with treats that remind you of Summer,
Yours Truly x.