Strawberry Preservation Workshop

As an intern at the ThinkTank, I'm involved in a bunch of workshops, either as a participant or as an instructor. Workshops in which all of the CCI interns are participants (these workshops are put on for our edification, actually) are pretty common, so it is not unusual to get a series of emails with titles like, "Mannequin Making Workshop," or "Disaster Workshop," or "Packing Workshop."

So when I got one with the title, "Strawberry Preservation Workshop," it took me a moment to realize that the word strawberry was included, and that that wasn't very conservation-y.

Strawberries are very much in season right now, and the vendors down at the Byward Market are selling them practically by the bushel-load. As part of encouraging everyone to buy fresh, buy local, the Sandy Hill Community Centre offered a two-hour workshop on Strawberry Preservation. Also known as making strawberry jam.

So we all attended the workshop and learned how to make strawberry jam. Then, a week later, it was time to put our book-learnin' to the test. We had originally planned to do it old-school-style, picking our strawberries ourselves, but the weather has been really uncooperative. Meeting at Marie-Catherine's house - we mashed and boiled sixteen cups of fresh Canada strawberries into jam. Actually, a whole lot of boiling happened. We boiled the strawberries, the jars, the lids, the jam in the jars, everything.

My portion of the jam. There was a great deal of high-fives in the kitchen after the jam thickened and the lids were sucked down into place, making a distinctive popping sound.

Success!