We’ve been celebrating food these past few days.

We’ve grown, cooked, and eaten our very own carrots! While they were not large, they were very tasty. They tasted the way you imagine carrots to taste. Sweet and crisp. We’ve got a whole bunch more still growing in the garden, and we’re looking forward to eating them.

Today we drove down south about 30 miles to a small farm and picked berries with our good friend Debbie Yoon — we woke up early because it got up to 90+ degrees at the farm. Thankfully, San Francisco only got into the high 70s. We picked a couple of different kinds of blackberries. I don’t really remember the names of them but I do remember eating them. Sweet, slightly tart and warm from the sun! Oh, so very good.

We picked 12 small baskets worth. You know the little square baskets that blackberries come in at the store. We picked 12 baskets worth of those. We also recently bought a huge flat of raspberries from a local farm, which I think had about 24 baskets worth! Today Carmen made 12 8oz jars of jam. Raspberry, blackberry, and a mix of the two with strawberry! We never realized how easy it is.

First, get some kick ass fruit. Second, stick them in a pot. Third, add sugar. Fourth, boil it until it looks like jam. Note: most recipes call for equal a lot of sugar, but we found that 1 cup of sugar to 6 cups of berries works pretty well.

The raspberry jam was really interesting. When we ate the raspberries fresh, they were very mellow and sweet. Very mild. After we made jam out of them, they became much more tart and stronger in flavor. They still taste great, but it really caught us by surprise.

Yesterday Carmen made banana nut bread, so we went to town eating the thick slices with home made jam on top!