yummy and jammy

Last Friday I took the kids to Krause Farms to u-pick raspberries. Krause is funny. It's a pretty slick farm - I'd call it the Ikea of farming. Everything neat and clean, regimented parking, a bright, funky store, and the "Porch" which is a cafe selling sinful pies and shortcakes to eat while looking out over the fields. It's the kind of farm even true city slickers would feel comfortable at.

The farm also has a u-pick etiquette guide which points out that eating while picking is theft. If you want a sample prior to picking, they have some free samples in the store. At certain times, you may be assigned to a row, but we were there during free pick, which was much nicer as we could wander where we liked.

Amelia proved to be a hard worker; Hugo discovered he much prefers the concept of picking berries to the actual reality of doing it. He hung in there for a bit and then quietly amused himself by watching clouds drift and then going to check out the tree farm next door and examining the barbed wire fencing - it's apparently more interesting to figure out how barbs on a fence work than to try to fill your bucket with berries. The canes were a bit picked over so it wasn't exactly easy pickings but in a bit over an hour we got just under 20 lbs.

We bought some more fruit, treated ourselves at the cafe (raspberry shortcake for me; fresh berry milkshakes for the kids) and then drove home.



Or rather, got stuck on the freeway in the bridge traffic for almost an hour. I don't know what is going on with the Port Mann bridge but every time I've been coming westbound on it, I've been stuck way past 200th Street. I compulsively listened to the CBC & News1130, listening for the traffic, which just repeatedly told me that Hwy 1 was backed up to 234th. It's not like I can get off the freeway so I don't know why I bothered with the endless traffic reports, but when you're going 5 kph on a 100 kph freeway, it seems important to know why. It was a slow news day so we heard over and over again the story of the pirate treehouse which was going to have to come down. The kids were killing themselves with laughing about it. This is a news worthy event? So newsworthy that we had to hear about it repeatedly during the drive home?

All of the traffic meant that by the time we got home it was late & that pushed dinner even later and at one point it looked like I'd be making jam at 8:30 in the evening. Luckily reason (his name is Roo) prevailed and we put off making jam until the next morning.

The kids both helped. Hugo as usual was interested more in the how of everything - how does the canner work? how do the jars seal? why can you use the lids only once? why do we need the rack in the canner? It's obviously been a couple years since I made jam as he had no memory of it. Amelia stirred and stirred and stirred and then it was all done, including a convenient 8th jar which didn't get quite full enough to seal and so became our test jar. Yum.

Old fashioned raspberry jam - just berries and water, no pectin added. Preheat the sugar in an oven. Have an assistant stir the gently boiling jam until candy thermometer reads 219F.