Gram's Jelly!

I'm not sure how many people outside of Wyoming and Utah still make their own jelly, but if you've ever had one bite of a homemade biscuit with Grandma Ruth's chokecherry or gooseberry jelly, you'll understand why all that mess is 100% worth it. It is nectar of the gods. There is NOTHING like Gram's jelly. Unfortunately, Mama has pretty much run through her stores (...she's a hoarder at heart) of Gram's jelly. That meant it was time to attempt to make some of our own. Mama'd never made jelly, but with recipe in hand and a lot of help from Leslie, Uncle Wade, Gram, and Daddy, we DID it!

The first step was berry pickin'... Mama picked gooseberries first - they're on pricker bushes so we couldn't get into the thick of that, but we picked the blossoms off like champs!

Next, Uncle Wade took us to strip the chokecherry trees bare. We had so much fun and made awesome memories :D

We picked 11.8lbs of berries - that's 4 batches of jelly (with at least 9 jars per batch!)

We spent most of the night de-stemming the berries, but Mama and Daddy were so proud of how big a help we were!

Then the real fun began - we made jelly!! We had to help mama measure everything out, but it was so hot that we couldn't do much about filling the jars... in a few years we'll be tightening rings like pros though!

The finished product! It took a little experimentation (the pic above is actually Mama fixing an oops..it's hard to take pictures of jelly making - it happens so fast!), but we finally got it just right. Gram's chokecherry jelly lives again!