Raspberry Freezer Jam (with a twist of chipotle)

Okay, well, it’s time for our 3^rd official blog post.  Unfortunately we didn’t take Thanksgiving recipe photos…we figure everyone has their favorites and with this blog just starting well, just too much at once.  So instead we made jam…FREEZER JAM that is.  One of our local grocery stores had raspberries .50 cents (yes fifty cents…unheard of) a container.  Immediately the hubs thought, “we need to make some freezer jam”…like his folks used to make. 

So the Hubs bought a case of 12 and here we go…it was so SIMPLE. 

What you will need: raspberries, sugar, pectin & fresh lemon juice.

  

The first thing we did was sprayed them with a 50/50 solution of water and vinegar.  Then we rinsed them and picked out the ones that weren’t as pretty as the others or looked gooey. 

Next, since we could only rinse so many at a time we moved the cleaned ones into a measuring cup to smash them. While I went on to continue cleaning another batch, the Hubs smashed away.

This was easy and this also gave us an accurate measurement of how many cups we have to add the proper amount of ingredients later.  After each mashing we placed them in a large bowl.

We followed the instructions on the back of the Ball Fruit Jelly (Freezer Jam Pectin) and the only thing we can suggest is to maybe add a bit on lemon juice to help it become more jammy like. 

We then mixed it up with the sugar (to your tasting) and 2 packages (based on how many cups of jam we had) and then took a soup ladle and our handy dandy funnel and put into jars. 

Towards the end, we decided we wanted to add some chipotle peppers to it to pour over cream cheese and eat with crackers so we saved about five ladles full of the jam and added chipotle peppers into it.  This gives the jam a spicy/sweet flavor and is delicious over cream cheese.

And WA LA here we have 8 jars of regular jam and 5 jars of the chipotle/raspberry jam.  The whole process was about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

They then went to the freezer after they set for about 2 hours.  We will dress up the jars and give them to our neighbors and family as Christmas presents, with suggested uses.

M & S

Uptown Grange