Monkey Butter

Monkey Butter Ingredients

5 medium, perfectly ripe bananas (no brown spots), peeled and sliced
1/2 of a ripe pineapple
1/4 cup ground coconut
3tbsp lemon juice
3 cups organic white sugar

I chopped the pineapple and crushed it with the flat side of my knife.

Peel and slice the bananas and add it to the sugar, coconut, and lemon juice in a heavy pot.

Then I scraped the pineapple, juice and all, into the pot with the rest of the ingredients.

Bring it all to a boil and cook it until the bananas dissolve and the jam thickens.

Towards the end the Monkey Butter was as thick as I wanted it but the bananas were still chunky, so I used a potato masher to help them along.

Fill your jars leaving 1/4-1/2 inch headspace (sorry for blurry picture but you get the idea).

Process the jars in a waterbath for 15 minutes.

Monkey butter is delicious spread over whole wheat toast in the morning, mixed in with yogurt for an afternoon snack, or served on top of ice cream.

It's a very simple recipe that is great to practice your canning skills.

Strawberry Jam

Spring came early and the strawberries are perfectly ripe.

It's always more fun to pick with friends.

We picked around 60lbs of berries between the 3 families.

We went back to my place and set up to make jam all day. We set the campstove out on the front porch to give us more burners. This picture was taken after we were done. We did the water bath canning on the stove in the house and cooked the jam on the campstove.

Three people can make a lot of jam. The work was easier and there was only one mess to clean up.