Must Have Jam

Kinda like a zombie, only it's "Jam...jam..." rather than "Brains...brains..."

But store jam is so bad and all sugar and barely tastes like fruit and mystery fruit at that even when there is a picture of a blackberry on the label. This reality led me to go pick strawberries, or rather go pick up strawberries. I need some good jam that tastes like real fruit.

So I bought frozen strawberries, let them thaw in the fridge for a couple days, and made jam tonight. Here's the evidence:

Look at my treasure:

And of course once I had jam I had to make a quick batch of biscuits to eat some jam on. For your future information, 1/2 cup of flour makes three biscuits.

Yummy!


Evaluating the price:
Safeway had a coupon for a 40 oz bag of frozen strawberries for $5, or $2 per pound. I don't know if that's a good deal or not (it's more than we paid for U-pick berries with Erin last spring, isn't it Karl?) but it was a total of $5 for the strawberries, $3.50 for the pectin, half a lemon, and some sugar. Say $10 for the whole batch. It made about 6 cups which is probably at least 6 jars of jam, and a jar of jam definitely costs more than $2 in the store so it's a pretty good deal even with commercially priced berries.

And now I have proper freezer jam that actually tastes like berries and not like sugar.

In other news I had an interesting day at work. Tanya, one of the 2010 HUD PMFs, organized a Pecha Kucha session with three current PMFs speaking about the work of their offices. The Pecha Kucha format is a presentation with 20 slides, each slide shown for only 20 seconds. It is quick and lively. I enjoyed hearing about the activities of some of my fellows. It is a good way to get a broader picture of what all is going on at HUD. Following the Pecha Kucha we got into a discussion about employee retention and making HUD a better place to work for younger employees. Apparently HUD has one of the lowest five-year retention rates for new employees in the federal government so there are plenty of opportunities for improvement. It was a real example of the kind of creative and change-motivated thinking that is supposed to be one of the contributions of us in the PMF program. I quite appreciate seeing it in action, and I will definitely get involved with the "Under Five" working group.

Well it's after 10 so I'm headed to bed. I'm trying to get to sleep earlier since I've been getting up at 5:40 in the morning. Fortunately I've got that walk to work to get my blood flowing in the morning.