Happy NaBloPoMo Eve, also known as Halloween.

We had a decent Halloween this evening, and I took my two little monkeys trick-or-treating down the street and back tonight.  Ian had a great time of it, and always wanted to be the first one to the door.  Blake politely said thank you in baby sign each time someone put candy in his bag.  Fortuitously for me, his monkey mits made it a challenge for Blake to pick a candy from each of the bowls, so I took the liberty to choose for him (me).  Blake's bag might be biased toward M&Ms, Twix, and Butterfinger.  Unfortunately for me, I carried him on my hip, so my arms were twitchy and achy by the time we had finished traveling door to door begging for candy.  When we got home, we sorted through the loot and put the sticky goey candies back in our bowl for redistribution to the other families in the neighborhood, and kept the chocolaty treats and the hard candy on a stick.

The boys at my office for some trick-or-treat.  I was the tourist, taking pictures of the fauna.

So starting tomorrow, we'll be in November, which I am planning to participate in Blog Posting Month, and Jen said I could "Occupy Funghi Fritti Street" during the staged event.  Should be good.  I've been brainstorming things worthy of a blog post.  Now just to find the time to create my daily record.

As a preview, I make my first offering:  A look at sugars.  After all, it IS Halloween.

This summer, I made a bunch of Strawberry Jam, since Jen went and picked 30 pounds of the sweetest, ripest berries at a PYO (Pick Your Own) farm in Southern Maine with her mother.  Generally, I'm not much of a fan of using PYO as a means to get bulk items, since you have to pay a premium to have the chance to make your own selection.  Most of the time, I'm happy to have the leftovers for the sake of making apple chips, peach jam (free last year!), or tomato sauce.  But.  Pristine strawberries and leftover strawberries have a very wide chasm of quality between them.  The flats of strawberries Jen came home with smelled like sweet nectar and were mouth-wateringly delightful.  Jen said the impetus behind the 30 pounds was to make enough jam to make it through to next summer.  And we go through alot of Jam around here folks.  So I went and bought a few bags of sugar and a whole case of pectin.

Jen said she wanted freezer jam, because it tastes sooooo good.  You get the raw berry flavor, plus the tang from the pectin when you do freezer jam.

I made 12 batches.  Freezer jam takes 2 cups berries and 4 cups sugar per box of pectin.  Catch that?  Twice as much Sugar!  No wonder Jen likes it so much!  I got pretty good at making a double batch, even, but much beyond that and I couldn't get the timing right on boiling the pectin and dissolving all the sugar with the fruit and cooked pectin.  (Raw fruit, remember, so the only heat comes from the boiled pectin.)

Total Strawberries: $60, 48 cups  ~$1.25 per cup

Pectin: $2.00/box

Sugar: 2.78/5 lb bag, 11.25 cups/5 lb, ~$.25 per cup

Freezer Jam breakdown: 12 batches, 2 c. berries, 4 c. sugar=> ~30 pints  (in 12 pints, 10 half pints, and as many plastic containers as we had).  So each batch ran about $5.50 for 2.5 pints = $2.20 per pint.

Those twelve batches were starting to get a bit tedious, because using up the berries only 2 cups at a time was pretty slow going.  I was starting to get worn out, I was looking at a rapidly diminishing supply of freezer-eligible containers, and thought it was time for a change.  Now, last year, when I stocked up on the end-of-season mason jars, there were a few boxes of sugar-free pectin that I picked up, too, just because.  You know, you want to have something for all your diabetic friends.  (Or does the strawberry sugar negate the sugar-free part of the equation?)  It's a cooked recipe, so the jam DEFINITELY tastes different.  Cooked berries and no heaps of sugar, but replaced with honey is quite likely to be... different.  But it was a fun experiment still.

Sugar-free breakdown: 2 batches, 4 c. berries, 1 c. honey=> 5 pints (in 5 pint sealed jars), which puts my estimate around $8 for 2.5 pints, or $3.20 per pint.

Now that I was out of the sugar-free pectin and out of freezer containers, I came down the home stretch with traditional jam for the food storage shelves.  I figured this was the most prudent thing to do, as it used the berries up and prevented our careful investment in the Maine Berry industry from rotting before our eyes.

Regular breakdown: 3 batches, 5 c. berries, 7 c. sugar=> 12 pints (in 12 pint sealed jars), costing about $10 for 4 pints, equaling $2.50 per pint.

So now you ask, "Joe, what do you make of these facts and figures from your Summer Jam Session?"

Here's what I have to say:  The freezer jam, though heavy on the sugar, DOES taste the best of the three recipes, costs the least, and requires the least amount of berries per pint of jam.  I resisted early on because of the sugar to berry ratio, and I just thought it was silly to not take advantage of my mad canning skills.  Turns out that we've barely made a dent in the jam supply so far, and I think if we backed off from 30 pounds to 10 pounds next year, that'd still cover us for a year's supply of freezer jam.  And for my last observation-- I probably didn't need to process ALL of the berries, since we have a freezer and could have kept some whole for milk-shakes.  But I didn't think of that until afterward, did I?


Anything else I should consider for the jam-fest?