Buckets o'blues

Blueberries are my favorite fruit, not only to eat, but especially to cook. You don't have to peel them, like apples; you don't have to pit them AND peel them, like peaches; and you don't have to wait for the eeexxaaccttt right moment of ripeness to use them, like pears. Blueberries are happy to wait for you in the fridge, content to hang out till you're ready to use them.
My family picked pounds--like, 12 of 'em--of blueberries the other day at a pick-your-own in the next town over. We met just about everybody we knew there, doing the same thing we were: Greedily stocking up on an incredible taste that would be around for just a few weeks. My kids have heard this so often in the last couple of years that they finish the sentence for me now: "Now that we've preserved these, we can get them out in the middle of winter and..." And the kids chime in: "We'll have a taste of summer!"
What did we do with these pounds of berries? Pie, of course (blueberry pie's the fave for breakfast around here), berries and cream, some nice cobbler, and just a bowl of the sweet things on the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Oh, and the blueberry jam I was threatening to make. Double batch, reduced-sugar recipe, lids and rings, real canned jam. Absolutely delicious--even my jam-shy husband has been eating it by the spoonful. I used a special type of pectin that my friend Deb researched and ordered (www.pomonapectin.com). Instead of the supermarket-pectin recipe, which uses 6 cups of fruit and 7 cups of sugar, the reduced-sugar kind calls for 8 cups of fruit and anywhere from 1 to 4 cups of sugar. I split the difference and used about 3 of sugar. Now, I'm not the sugar police, not even close (just look in my cabinets), but when I eat jam I want to taste fruit!