I often find myself buying various kinds of jams etc to spread on my bread for snacks and whatnot. The other day I went out to check on my raspberry plants and suddenly found myself with a surplus of berries. So I thought maybe I should make jam or something with them. In case anyone wants to try this at home, here is how it works…

1. Plant some raspberries.
2. Wait until you have so many berries you don’t know what to do with them.
3. Call mom to ask how canning works and hope she offers to basically do it for you.

Now that all that is settled, here are the steps of actually making the jam.

First, you need to rinse off the berries. I didn’t use any pesticides or anything like that, so it’s mainly leaves, dirts, and bugs that need to come off. For the record, rinsing these guys is kind of difficult and I’m not sure how effective my method was.

Put the berries in a pot and heat and smash them until you create a boiling pot of raspberry juice.

Add the same amount of sugar as you have raspberries. Continue boiling for about 5 minutes until it forms a gel like substance.

This is what it should look like when it’s done. You can either eat it now or freeze it. But if you want to store the jam in your cabinet for decades, then continue on to the next step.

Pour the jam into mason jars of whatever size you want. Make sure the lips are nice and clean, screw on a new canning lid, and drop the jars into boiling water for several minutes using this weird scissor-lift tool.

While the jars are boiling, lick the spatula thing.

Take the jars out of the boiling water and place them on the counter. Eventually the tops will make a ‘pop’ sound and you know it’s sealed. If they don’t seal then you’re pretty much screwed.

Now you have delicious raspberry jam that will last you throughout the winter months!