I had what I call, this great idea today while eating my peanut butter and elderberry jam sandwich. I’m not much for food preparation. I like to cook and I like to entertain but I’ll tell you what, processing fruits for canning is a royal pain. It took forever to strain those chokecherries. Granted the juice was delicious but there must be a faster way so I come up with a cheat while enjoying my sandwich. I simply scattered my thawed elderberries in the elderberry jam to add a little more to the sandwich and thought why not mix elderberries with existing jam? Choose your favorite flavor. Mine will most likely be raspberry and strawberry. Yep, I’ll do it twice.
So let’s call this the lazy mans recipe to elderberry jam, shall we? After all we have all the ingredients available in the jam from our storage already or we can buy it from the store. Now I’m sure there are all kinds of reasons this should not be done. Something about the preservatives? Perhaps the ratio will be off when adding the new berries to the existing jam? I’m not an expert but I figure this can be an easy way to at least get the goodness of those elderberries into your peanut butter sandwich so you can enjoy the protection from the flu this season. I’m sure you guys reading this will appreciate my efforts.
Making the jam is easy. Let’s forego all that ingredients nonsense that so many recipes have and just start with what we need. Choose your favorite jam and grab a handful of ripe elderberries. Add them to the jam and mix. I like the elderberries and I like the benefits so I personally am going to use a lot of elderberries. If I have 16 ounces of jam already I’ll likely use a full cup or more of the berries and just mix them in. I’ll have either a half used jar of jam or I’ll mix it all into a mixing bowl of some sort if I can find one in the kitchen. This is after all foreign territory for me. Once all is mixed I’ll scoop it back into the original jar and find a container for the rest of it. Then I’ll take the leftover and make myself a sandwich right now. There will likely be left overs after all since I am a guy in the kitchen making jam from jam. No need to complicate it. It is what it is and we’ll live with it. Keep it simple and easy and life can go on.