I bought 2 lugs of Colorado peaches at the grocery store yesterday….boy were they nice! I also picked up 2 pints of nice-looking blueberries and thought as long as I was in the mood to make peach jam, I could easily make a small batch of blueberry jam to go with.
All in all, I canned 17 quarts of peaches, 6 half-pints of peach jam, 5 half-pints of spiced peach jam, and 3 half-pints of blueberry honey jam (one of which never made it to the shelves!)
I found a nice recipe for Blueberry Honey Jam on http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/2014/06/26/blueberry-jam-honey-sweetened/. I like this recipe because it’s a small-batch recipe, and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time working on it. The recipe also works for most berries and fruit, with the exception of apples, and I also followed this recipe for one of the peach jams I made today. They both turned out delicious!
Blueberry Honey Jam
- 1 quart blueberries (approximately 1½ pounds)
- ⅔ cup honey (8 ounces)
- ½ lemon, juiced
- Pour the berries into a low, wide, non-reactive pan and mash.
- Add the honey and lemon juice and stir to combine. Let the mixture sit until the honey begins to dissolve.
- Place the pan on the stove and bring to a boil. Cook, stirring regularly, for 10 to 12 minutes, until the jam thickens.
- To make the jam shelf stable, pour it into clean, hot jars. Apply lids and rings and process in a boiling water bath canner for ten minutes.
- When time is up, remove jars from the canner and place them on a folded kitchen towel and let them cool.
- When the jars are room temperature, check the seals. If the lids have gone concave and don’t wiggle at all, they are sealed.
- Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used within a few weeks.
- If you don’t want to process the jam, just pour it into a jar, let it cool, and put it in the refrigerator.
For my peach jam recipe, I basically used the Blueberry Honey Jam recipe, although I did use sugar instead of honey.
For the spiced peach jam, I had a few peaches leftover from the first box, so I added a few spices that I normally add to a peach pie. I think it turned out delicious!
Spiced Peach Jam
Approximately 2 quarts diced peaches
1-1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon good vanilla
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
Place diced peaches in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and mash with a potato masher. Add remaining ingredients. Heat to a boil, stirring frequently. Cook at a rolling boil for approximately 10 minutes, or until the jam thickens.
Ladle into hot half-pint jars. Seal. Process in a boiling-water canner for 15 minutes.
Yield: 5 half-pints
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We are away on vacation right now, but I will be trying these jams as soon as I get home! Thanks for linking up with "Try a New Recipe Tuesday." I hope you will be able to join us again this week. http://our4kiddos.blogspot.com/2014/08/try-new-recipe-tuesday-beach-edition-818.html