Strawberries provide us with an inflated sense of our own skill. We garden. We grow tomatoes and herbs and peppers and cucumbers. We rank—at best—as average gardeners. We aren’t quite focused or dedicated enough to excel. Nevertheless, every spring, we harvest a magnificent bounty of plump, delectable strawberries. “Damn,” we think, “how green are these thumbs?!”

This year, we transformed a bowl of homegrown strawberries into jars of honey vanilla strawberry jam. Our morning toast never tasted so good. We used the jam cycle of our Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso, which made the whole process a breeze. Here’s how we did it.

Honey Vanilla Strawberry Jam

Ingredients

• 8 cups of fresh sliced strawberries
• One cup of honey
• 1/2 cup of lemon juice
• One tablespoon of vanilla extract
• Two tablespoons of Pomona’s Universal Pectin
• Two tablespoons of Calcium water (see instructions on box of Pomona’s Universal Pectin)

Directions

Combine all ingredients in the bread machine. Run on jam cycle. Funnel finished jam into four-ounce jars. Wipe rims clean, place on lids, and screw on jar rims. Place jars in a pot of boiling water. Use a steamer basket to avoid jars being on bottom of the pot. Remove jars after ten minutes, and let cool.