My first canning of the summer season isn’t really seasonal, but had a definite purpose. In my quest for new and interesting sandwich ideas for dinner over the winter, I hit upon fig preserves as an idea for a sandwich spread.
Do you know how expensive fig preserves are? And how much the BF ended up liking them? That became an issue, because I refuse to pay grocery store prices again. So I figured I’d make my own instead.
This was the Heavenly Fig Jam recipe from Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving. It’s based on dried figs (I’d briefly considered the fresh fig recipe from the same book, but frankly, I don’t have that much free time), and was really easy, and came out really delicious. Dried figs are $7.99 a pound, and I did have to buy powdered pectin, but if you add that together, it still came out as less than two jars of the same size of store-bought fig preserves.
You’ll notice the white cover on one of the jars. That’s because I had my first ever seal failure in this batch of jam. I think I actually had the ring on too tightly, and the vacuum was never able to form. I’m not too bummed out by it – I figure it had to happen sometime, and it did end up giving me really easy access to samples.