Raspberries

I'm not big on berries, but the better half and myself decided to make homemade Raspberry jam the other night. Why? You could reason that someone slipped us some hallucinogens while we weren’t looking but, actually, it’s just about how one thing leads to another...

We were out with the kids. We went to an apple orchard with my wife’s sister and her son. Had a great time, and on the way home we stopped to show our kids my wife’s old house, the one she grew up in. So we went there and looked at it.

It just sat there.

But next door was my wife’s old neighbor, who happens to run a Raspberry farm. So, I thought, let’s go visit and, while we’re there, we can pick a few berries for the kids. We parked, we said "hello," we talked for a while and asked if we could pick a few berries. He grabbed three LARGE trays filled with little plastic berry baskets. He said, “We’ll see how much you guys can pick.”

Okay.

So we picked. And we picked. And we picked some more. We ended up with a lot of berries, which made me a bit nervous as I only had a ten in my pocket. I thought, well, we picked some berries for the guy. He can sell them to someone else. But what he did was give us the Raspberries. He wouldn’t take a dime. It was an amazing kindness that was totally NOT expected. It blows me away how nice some people are, especially considering how nice some people aren’t. And in case you ever read this: Thanks again Mr. B.

My wife’s sister took some of the berries, but she didn’t want much, which left a lot of berries. A lot. My kids ate some, but they couldn’t eat all those berries. So, what do you do?

You make jam. Isn't that what you do? You make jam.

I Googled for jam recipies, figured out the basic ingredients, and decided to do “cooked” jam so it would last longer. I recruited the wife and we stumbled through four and a half jars of Raspberry jam, boiled the jars before and after and all that. Burned myself a few times. It was chaos. Didn’t think ahead of time about how I was going to get the jars in and out of the boiling water. Apparently they have tools for that, but I didn’t think about it until after the water was already boiling and the jam was cooking. So there you go. We figured it out. We used some plastic tongs and whatever we could find. It was madness. But...

Right now, in the fridge, are some jars of pretty incredible Raspberry jam. I had some on toast and, I’m telling you, it’s very tasty.

By the grace of God.

P.S. Yes, the picture is what we made, not some internet fake. Also, while writing this post, my spell correct taught me that they are called RASP berries. Not RAS berries or RAZ berries. You learn something new everyday.


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