My part of Southern Ontario is the southern most point of Canada, which generally means shorter winters (shorter than Thunder Bay) and fairly warm summers. Here in the Windsor area, the weather is pretty much the same as the Detroit area. Hot, humid summers are the norm.
This weather gives us an abundance of fresh produce. A few years ago, a girl friend and I decided that we would try our hand at canning fresh tomatoes. Her garden was over flowing and Leamington (about 45 minutes from here) is the tomato capital of Canada. We had no clue what we were doing, but we are both fairly literate and can follow simple directions from a recipe. The endeavor turned out perfectly, the jars sealed, and we celebrated the sealed jars with a toast of whatever wine she had leftover in the fridge. The fresh canned tomatoes provided homemade pasta sauce all winter long. Since then, we have preserved a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Today, we continued the tradition and made strawberry jam and strawberry-rhubarb jam. We started with eight quarts of locally grown strawberries and fresh rhubarb from her garden and ended up with over 20 pints of homemade jam. Later this week, we'll tackle cherry jam for the first time. Plus, we'll experiment just a little. She had purchased a jar of "black forest jam" from a street fair and it was quite delicious. We'll try our own version by adding and ounce of dark chocolate per quart of cherries. I'll let you know how it turns out.
