Tag Archives: strawberries

Homemade Strawberry Jam

strawberry jam

Homemade strawberry jam

I haven’t posted in a while, because it’s been kind of crazy and stressful here. Within the past month, we’ve put our condo on the market (hasn’t sold yet), put an offer on a single family house in the city, and decided to switch our kids from their excellent but pricy private religious school to a highly regarded public school. Whew, that’s a lot of changes!

My kids have learned so much this year, it’s amazing. In second grade, my older daughter learned about pioneers. As part of the unit, they wrote a newspaper called “Pioneer Times.” She was so proud to be working on a newspaper just like her Mom did, and she was thrilled to test the recipe for strawberry jam.

The class recipe for “Yummy Jam” comes right in time for peak strawberry season, and, of course, it’s naturally gluten-free. Strawberries are plentiful now (Costco even has huge containers of organic strawberries), so you won’t be breaking the bank to use four cups of berries for this recipe.

“Do you want to hear about a deeeeeeeeeelicious strawberry jam? Here’s how we do it,” the Room 204 pioneers write.

Click for the recipe

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Homemade Chocolate Truffles and Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

chocolate truffles

Homemade Chocolate Truffles

For me, Valentine’s Day is all about chocolate.

Most chocolate is gluten-free. Some chocolates, however, contain barley malt, like Lindt’s Lindor chocolate truffles, making them off-limits for celiacs. (For another discussion on gluten-free chocolates, see the Triumph Dining blog.)

For Valentine’s Day, the kids and I made homemade chocolate truffles dusted with coconut, cocoa, cinnamon and ground almonds. These sophisticated truffles look complicated but are easy to make — and even easier to eat!

If kids can roll a ball of Play-Doh (which is not gluten-free, by the way), they can roll truffles. It is messy, though. My 8-year-old’s hands were quickly covered in chocolate — and I feared for what would happen next — so she put on a long-sleeved art smock.

After rolling a bunch of truffles, we used the rest of the chocolate to make chocolate-covered strawberries. Yum!

I once went to a mom’s night out at Whole Foods where we made truffles and drank wine. This recipe is adapted from the one we used that night.

Click for the recipe

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Filed under desserts