In true Heifer International style (that’s one of my favorite nonprofits; they train families to care for livestock, and then the families must pass on the first born of their animals to another family in the village), I would like to introduce someone else to the fun that is making your own jam. Earlier this week, I read Alisha’s blog post about this — Alisha is a missionary in Vienna — and since I live near the German Deli, where she recommended buying gelling sugar, and the German Deli is down the street from Central Market, where I had a coupon for $10 of free produce this week, I decided there was no time like the present to learn how to can. I was surprised by how easy this task was, and I finished in less than an hour. If you don’t use the German gelling sugar (you can order it online), making jam is a bit more complicated, as you then have to find the right combo of pectin, sugar, and acid for your fruit. The gelling sugar is premixed, so it is perfect for beginning canners. You just use twice as much fruit as gelling sugar. We used about 340 grams of raspberries (so 170 grams of gelling sugar, and since I have a scale, I was able to measure) to make one jar of raspberry jam. With about 350 grams of blueberries, we made one jar of blueberry jam. If you read Alisha’s post, you’ll see that she used strawberries, and since strawberries produce more natural juice, you get more jam for less berry weight with them. Also, we combined the instructions from Alisha’s post with the directions in German on the gelling sugar sack and with some other online instructions we found. What did we do differently? We stirred the fruit at a rolling boil with the gelling sugar for at least three minutes, and we turned our cans upside down for 15 minutes immediately after filling them. Read and see more about our culinary adventure here.