Gettin' our can on!

Shouldn't it really be called "jarring" rather than "canning?" I mean, you're putting the stuff in jars not cans, right?
Anyway, Dar & I spent Tuesday morning canning strawberry jam for our first time ever!! Woot! Woot! And I can honestly say it was fun! Then again, pretty much everything we do together is fun no matter what it is. It took us 3 hours to can 5 batches of strawberries. I guess we may have gone a little overboard but we had no idea what to expect, since this was our first time. I'm sure it's going to take a while for the 2 of us to get through 30 jars of strawberry jam (although I have given a few jars away already). We bought 2 flats of strawberries the day before and got all the stuff together that we would need. (A HUGE thanks to Ron & Martha & Mama D for helping us out and all the great tips to get us started!) We used almost an entire 25 lb bag of sugar. No joke. On every single batch we did Dar was like, "Man! That's a lot of sugar!" Haha. He never got over the fact that you put in 8.5 cups of sugar to 5.5 cups of strawberries. No wonder we like strawberry jam so much! ;) And the even better thing is that all of our jars sealed and the jam tastes great! I was really loving the sound of the lids popping. Music to my ears!

My job was to cut all the stems off

And my amazing hubby did just about everything else :) But once I finally finished cutting all the strawberries, I was able to help him out with all the stuff he was doing.

Now that we're experts *wink*, we can't wait to can other stuff throughout the summer and into the fall, especially tomatoes and grape juice!! We've been wanting to do this for several years now and I'm glad we're finally to the point that we can dedicate enough time to actually get it done.