Jam, a great complement for baked goodies. Toast and Jam, a perfect combination.
I had always wanted to try my hands on jam-making and an article on a Chinese magazine called “the little thing” inspired me to actually do it this long weekend. The article was about an English lady living in Shanghai who found there is no good jam available in the city and decided to make her own and is now selling her homemade British jam as a business. Her name is Amelia.
I read about her recipe, another one noted in the same magazine, and also took note from Jamie Oliver’s strawberry jam recipe (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jamie-oliver/strawberry-jam-recipe/index.html), combined and made my own recipe as follow:
Ingredients: 900g strawberries, 300g caster sugar, juice from 1 lemon and zest from 1 lemon
1. Cut the strawberries into pieces, stir in the sugar, leave the mix in the fridge overnight
2. Grate lemon for zest and squeeze out the lemon juice, mix them into the strawberry/sugar mixture. Cook the mix on medium-heat until simmer and cook for a few more minutes on low-heat. Skim off foam during the cooking process.
3. Test if the jam is ready by placing a bit of it into the fridge for a short while and take it out to see if it is in your preferred consistency. Bottle them into sterilized jars when ready, then put it in the fridge overnight.
Tips:
1. Because no pectin is used in this recipe, this jam is not the jelly-kind, but relatively watery, but still very nice. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have put in the juice from a whole lemon, or I should have cooked the jam for longer for the jam turned out to be borderline watery.
2. You can sterilize the glass jar in an oven and boil the jar covers in boiler water. Make sure the covers are in materials that can endure the boiling process (the one I brought couldn’t, so…silly me had to make-do with sterilized aluminium foil as covers…shame…)
I have given 3 jars of jam away to 3 mothers in our family: my grandma and two aunts. We have 2 jars at home for breakfast/tea 
jam jam jam…jam jam jam…yum.
