Apricot Jam

This one was a first for me. Chris's family was able to get a harvest of some apricots off of their tree, and since his dad has just had his surjury, he is not able to enjoy them, and he won't be home for a few more weeks so we decided to make some jam out of them. I don't like apricots, so I didn't have any, but Chris said it was good!! So here is how we did it!!

Chris and I first brought over the harvest. We had three bowls like this that were completely full. Not bad for a first time harvest on this tree!

Then we chopped up the apricots into little tiny pieces.

The recipe that we had called for 2 1/2 cups of apricots, and we doubled that because we had so many apricots still! Then we had to bring the apricots and one package of pectin to a rolling boil.

When it came to a boil, we added in 5 1/2 cups of sugar per batch (so really we added 11 cups of sugar) and stirred that in and brought it to another rolling boil and boiled it hard for 2 minutes. (Only do 1 minute if doing one batch at a time)

And then we filled our jars until about 1/4 inch from the top of the can. (and yes it gets a little messy!)

Then you wipe off the can and the top of it so that the seal will seal and not seal haha. That doesn't make any sense but you want to wash off the very tops of the jar and the rest of it is sticky and hot, that is why I am using a wet rag to hold onto the jar.

For doing jams/jellies, you don't have to pressure cook them, instead you steam them in a steamer, so we got our steamer out and got the water hot inside of it and filled it up with our jars.

This was after all of our jars were finished. We steamed them for about 25 minutes, just to make sure the seal would seal and then we pulled them out and Chris took a jar to his dad in Tucson while he is still recovering! Hopefully he thinks it is good! When we doubled the batch, we got 11 half pint jars filled. Also, when you do any kind of jam recipe, you want to follow it EXACTLY if is says only 2 1/2 cups of fruit, don't add any more than that!! It will mess up the jelling process to make the jam thick.

And this is what we did early one morning. It doesn't take very long at all and then you can have some different kinds of jam/jelly on your shelves for your food storage also!