Freezer Jam

" Hi, I'm Lori from the Better Homes and Gardens Test Kitchen. Everyone loves the flavor of fresh jam, and today, I'm gonna show you a quick and simple way to make homemade freezer jam that you and your family can enjoy year-round. So to get started, you're gonna need a few simple ingredients. First, you wanna start out with about 4 cups of fresh berries. For today's purpose, we're gonna use fresh strawberries, and what we wanna do is just take like a potato masher, and we're just gonna mash up these berries. We've got 4 cups of sugar. So, I'm just gonna put my sugar in a bowl. I've got a half a teaspoon of freshly shredded lemon peel. You wanna add that for some nice fresh flavor, and then, I'm going to add my mashed-up strawberries. Now, I'm just gonna stir this all together really well. We wanna incorporate all the berries into the sugar mixture, and once I do that, I'm gonna let this mixture stand for about 10 minutes. So as your berries are standing for that 10 minutes, what you wanna do is you wanna get your pectin mixture going. What I have here is just a 1-3/4-ounce package of regular powdered fruit pectin. You wanna add that to a small saucepan along with 3/4 cup of water. You want to boil this for 1 minute, and if necessary, you can adjust your heat a little bit, just so the mixture doesn't boil over. So I have my fruit mixture here that has been standing for 10 minutes and my hot pectin mixture. I'm simply gonna pour it in. So after we're done stirring for about 3 minutes, and the sugar has dissolved, we're just simply gonna take our little freezer containers here, and I love these. These are plastic. They're freezer safe. Okay, so we're gonna finish filling our jar here, and you wanna leave about a half inch of space from the top of the jar just to allow some expansion for when it freezes, and then I have these little lids here that just screw on, and there you have it. Just let these containers stand on your counter overnight. This will help them set up, and then once they are set up the next day, they can be put in your refrigerator for up to 3 weeks or you can just pop them in your freezer, and have them for a year. So there we have it. This is a great way for you and your family to enjoy the taste of fresh berries all year round."