Category: General News

And the winner of the 2010 Haller jam tasting is…

…wait, I’ll make you read the post before I tell you.

Last fall, Terry was traveling in Maine and found some wild blueberry jelly that he loved. You might even say that he went gaga for it. It got him thinking about jams and jellies, and…long story short…he ordered thirty jars of jelly from a handful of award-winning jelly makers so we could all taste them and determine our favorites.

In response, for the last several weeks, my siblings and I have all teased him relentlessly about how ridiculous it is for him to buy thirty jars of jam. However, I’ve retracted my taunts. Today’s jam tasting was a lot of fun.

Alright, I did feel completely ill after forcing down the last eight or so pieces of jam covered toast, but the group taste testing experience was lively and exciting. Even the kids got into it. Andrew tried about eight types and carefully noted his score (always a five) on the score chart. Sylvia’s face and hands were an amazing color of purple when it was all over…

For the jam tasting, each participant (there were seven of us) got a Hallerized score card upon which to grade our impressions of each of the 29 types of jam.

Here Terry demonstrates him jam tasting technique.

There were a lot of jams to taste. And they were all good!

The post-jam tasting counter was a sticky sensation. (The picture below shows half of the jars of jam. Another set wrap around the other side of the counter!)

After we rolled out of the kitchen with our blood sugar levels soaring, we tabulated the results. Yeah, that’s right. The Babler family knows how to have fun. I am all about Saturday afternoons that involves spreadsheets. Ohhhh yeahhhh.

We determined the top rated jams by simple average. Although a part of me did want to run an Analysis of Variance test on that data!

Andrew busied himself with an iPhone.

And Sylvia tried on shoes that used to be Maretta’s.

Now I’m sure that at this point, you’re tense with expectation about what the winner is.

Well, I’ll tell you.

It wasn’t this one, though this one was quite good.

I didn’t actually take a picture of the winning jam jar. So I’ll steal a picture from Amazon…

Harvest Song Apricot Preserve was our winner!

As you can see below, I’ve listed our top favorites and least favorites.

Top 5:
Harvest Song Apricot
Bonne Maman Blackberry
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Apple Pie
Stonewall Kitchen Black Raspberry
Bonne Maman Four Fruits

Bottom 5:
Harvest Song Sour Cherry
Smuckers Blackberry
Sarabeth’s Kitchen Peach Apricot
Harvest Song Peach
Bonne Maman Wild Blueberry

The results were quite mixed since each tester has favorite flavors and preferences. Some people’s favorite jam was others’ least favorite.

Here are our seven tester’s favorite jams.
Each tester gave a top score (5/5) to a different number of jams, so each tester has a different number of jams listed. Because all jams listed below were all given the same top score (except where indicated), they are listed in random order.

Lisa
Harvest Song Apricot
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Strawberry
Stonewall Kitchen Wild Maine Blueberry
Stonewall Kitchen Black Cherry
Stonewall Kitchen Blueberry Peach

Joe
Harvest Song Apricot (5)
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Apple Pie (5)
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Strawberry (4)
Stonewall Kitchen Black Raspberry (4)
Harvest Song Peach (4)

Terry
Bonne Maman Blackberry
Barefoot Contessa Lemon Curd
Bonne Maman Wild Blueberry

Miranda
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Apple Pie
Bonne Maman Wild Fruit
Harvest Song Apricot

Althea
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Strawberry
Bonne Maman Raspberry
Stonewall Kitchen Strawberry Balsamic
Stonewall Kitchen Apricot
Stonewall Kitchen Black Raspberry
Colorado Mountain Jam Organic Apricot
Bonne Maman Four Fruits

William
Stonewall Kitchen Black Raspberry
Bonne Maman Four Fruits
Harvest Song Apricot
Bonne Maman Blackberry
Stonewall Kitchen Black Cherry

Michael
Harvest Song Apricot
Bonne Maman Blackberry

************
So what do you think? Does this sound like fun? Did we miss a jam or jelly or preserve that you love best of all? Does your family do somewhat odd activities like this?
Mmmmm jam. Like sunshine in summer!

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I spent the morning yesterday playing at the A-Z Farm in Oregon, WI with Andrew’s preschool class.  It was so fun to see all the adorable baby animals and to see the adorable four and five year olds petting them.  Such cute overload.  Also, why is it that I have a strong urge to squeeze baby chicks?  They’re so cute, I just wanna squeeze them.  I should stay away from chicks.  Definitely.

I took pics of the animals to share with you.  Here are some of my favorites:

And then for comic relief:

We’ve been seeing a lot more of our neighbors Alivia and Rayna these days (I wrote about some of their cute games in a recent post).  The little girls had a rough patch where they weren’t tolerating each other very well, but then, suddenly, all the concerns about what was, “MINE!” seemed to evaporate, and they’re fast friends.  In fact, the other day, when Sylvia saw Rayna walking down her driveway (three houses down), she leapt off her trike, raised her arms above her head in an elaborately excited gesture, and raced down the street toward her…shrieking in glee.  It’s been so lovely having all four kids playing happily and easily together!

Here’s a few photos of them several weeks ago when we needed coats and hats:

Girls running!

Alivia thoughtfully working.

It’s so fun to watch how they play together:)

One of our last snowy pictures from early March.  The kids were digging a hole.  In their minds, it was a really big hole.

Seeing more of our neighbors again has been one of the really nice parts about the coming of spring!

“Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life”.

I ran across this quote from The Story People while I was browsing the web today, and it made me happy.  Being a stay at home mom, I sometimes find myself with excessive time.  Sometimes these last few months, when the day starts and we have no plans, I feel like I can see time stretching out toward dinner and bedtime as a loooong road that me and the kids would need to travel together.  Or perhaps like it was an obstacle course, and my goal was to make it to the finish in one piece.

If I was working outside the home, I think I’d be scrambling to find time to do the basics: grocery shopping, laundry, meals…  Being home full time, I sometimes think that all I have is time, but I’ve also got some individuals I live with who can make productive work, uh, challenging.  In fact, even with all the time I do have, I often find myself scrambling to do the basics.  Kids don’t cooperate, snuggling time occurs, life gets complicated, tantrums happen, playtime stretches out…

I find that I tend to be compulsively honest about not making excuses.  If I’m late or didn’t get something done, I find that I feel much better about fessing up with the honest truth rather than a light excuse.  “I’m not on time because I stayed in my pajamas too long.”  “I didn’t finish that project because I wanted to snuggle with my husband and watch The Office rather than work last night.”  Those feel better to me than, “Traffic was bad.” or “We got really busy.”  Along those lines, I don’t really like the “I didn’t have time” excuse.  It’s often true, and in some cases, there is just too much that absolutely needs to get done.  But when I hear “I didn’t have time” (or when I hear myself say it!), I also hear “It just wasn’t important enough.”

There’s time for the important things.  There’s always time for the important things, but it means I have to prioritize.  One of my goals is to keep a sharp eye out for the important things so I’m sure to make time for them in my life!

Hello friendly readers,

How do you feel about the speed of my blog?  I, for one, am feeling like it’s waaaay to slow.  Especially on my photography website.  Ugh.  It hurts to watch it load.

So with my free moments this morning, I started looking at hosting alternatives.  And being myself, I started by looking for a environmentally conscientious/green hosting provider.

SuperGreen hosting is looking good to me.  They’re supposedly fast with WordPress sites, which is the platform I use for my blogs, and they use renewable energy, plant trees, and don’t run horrible ads like GoDaddy.  yeah, I’ve got to switch.

Of course, it’s more than likely that I’ll run into problems that will shut down one or both of my sites for a couple days or will keep me up until 2am staring at my computer in confusion and sadness, but in the end, hopefully this little website will run much faster for you and I’ll sleep better knowing that I’m supporting a better hosting company!

Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Warnings?  Offers of chocolate?

In late February, we lived in a snowy winter wonderland.  We were sledding at Olbrich park, pulling the kids down the street in their sleds, and generally working hard to relish snow and winter for as long as possible so we didn’t go stir crazy for spring too early!

Here’s a little demonstration of the transition over the last several weeks.

Here we have a sparkling, snowy morning.  The tree is a maple that Bryan transplanted from a seedling a few years ago.  Those silver maples grow fast!!

So the chain link fence isn’t particularly picturesque, but the glittering snow is lovely!

Here’s my new sunflower sun catcher from Heather.  A beautiful bit of summer hanging in my snowy window.

In Sylvia’s room, I have a wintry (white) fairy display.  I just switched it to a brightly colored spring display.  Bye bye winter!

Then, the first weekend in March, the snow started melting.  Mellllting!

And within a few days…

The snow was gone!

Bye bye snow, hello spring…

More snow may be on the way, but this week, I took pictures (with my phone) of crocuses and snowdrops at Olbrich!

Spring…in the form of flowers and soaring turkey vultures and migrating sandhill cranes has made a stand!  Our neighbood owls (who’ve been hooting every night for months) have hatched at least one chick.  A neighbor found the shell on the ground beneath their tree.

Hip hip hooray for spring!