Apricot jam (no sugar added!)

It’s jam season!

Actually, it’s apricot season. Katie & I picked lots of apricots from our friend’s tree so we decided to try our hands at jamming. Little did we know that 40-50 apricots, 4 hours of manual labor, and getting burned while following proper water bath canning procedure would produce.. 4 jars of jam. (We had 24 jars on hand.)

Use honey – not sugar

When we looked up apricot jam recipes, I was shocked by how much sugar all the recipes asked for. However, I found a recipe that uses honey instead of sugar and results were great! It helps to use super ripe apricots as well.

Ingredients

Jam is actually super easy to make. We followed this recipe & only used the following:

Organic apricots

Organic lemon

Organic honey

Dash of ginger and cinnamon

I also cut some cardstock & stamped both the white labels and gift tags (below):

Katie’s rambling on canning

Katie: I always wondered how jams were able to stay on shelves for months. Mary may have thought I was a little paranoid about canning properly. We didn’t need any fancy canning equipment – just a pot of boiling water. It was a little difficult to take the mason jars in and out (hence the hand burning) and it probably would have been better to have a bigger pot, but overall I think the jars sealed okay!

Tips for next time

Mary: I really don’t think canning is necessary. Just gift it right away & ask the recipient to refrigerate it. Also, if you’re making these as gifts, make sure you have enough apricots to fill plenty of jars (not just 4).

Overall, homemade jam is easy to make, delicious, and pretty as gifts.