I am sitting near my kitchen, it’s late and the water’s boiling. I’ve just finished making blueberry jam. As I can my jars (I follow the information that’s found here, oh except I process them for 10 minute), I’m catching up on some blog posts. I might even post Canada Day. That may be stretching it though.
Tonight was belly dance, more cans, a pause by the lindy hop dance studio then errands and home to making jam.
I’ve started taking a belly dancing class because I find that I really want to work on my movement and body isolations. I also think it will help with self and body confidence. My friend Jools and I are doing it (I’m still searching for nicknames for everyone… Jools for one friend and Jules for another works… I hope..) and tonight was week 2.  I’ve found that I can get the motion with the hips going, the upper torso body isolations are a challenge and combining things… well that’s like patting your head, rubbing your stomach and walking while chewing gum combined. Awkward. But I think I’m learning a lot.
Afterwards I came home and am making jam. again. One of my activities these past few weeks has been to make jam. Likely for gifts, so hopefully by the time I give them away, those people who are reading this will have forgotten… 😛 I realized that I love local berries and enjoy jam and I’ve really started to prefer natural, local foods and I prefer to know what’s in my food. So I’m making jam. I made two batches of Strawberry Jam the other week (17.5+ cups of jam later… plus frozen berries), and I will make 2 batches of Blueberry Jam. Plus more of who knows what…
It’s satisfying me the way that baking satisfies, and it has the bonus of not being something I’m tempted to eat right away (other than to mop up the drippings because it is very very yummy), plus it might end up being a homemade gift, so it’s all good…
I think I also like it because there’s a science to making jam, and it gives me time to think and process and after this past week, I definitely need that.
So I’m having fun. Tomorrow I’ll make batch #2, and maybe I’ll even take photos, and then I have to sort out how to can tomatoes because in a few weeks I’ll have 1000’s of them. My tomato plants are huge…
Enough random chatter. My canning’s done.