This time of year means one thing....small beautiful berries! Berry's are in abundance. Every Wednesday our local paper has a Flavor Section. Low and behold this weeks paper featured Strawberries!
The paper featured an article on making Strawberry Jam. It was fun reading about someone who was very fearful of making jam but was basically being forced to learn and write about it for this article.
Our garden holds a wonderful albeit very small berry patch. Unfortunately, that is only large enough to barley feed our berry loving family. We eat fresh strawberries anyway possible. My favorite: smoothies. I can hide all kinds of veggies and supplements (i.e., fiber) without my little ones being the least suspicious of eating healthy stuff. But we also make ice cream in the Via-mix, fresh berries and a Strawberry Pie!! Now that is why berries are love so much - yummy pie!!
My husband and our oldest son has already had a head start on the berry pickin' season. Last week we picked over 60 lbs of berries. So our day of fresh berry picking lead us out to a local farm. It was a wonderful way to slow down and re-connect with our community and nature. We picked our beautiful sweet berries from Poor John's Farms. We talked a great deal with Poor John. There is something special seeing and speaking to the people who grow the food you are eating. It not as easy as pulling a plastic package off the grocery store shelf but it is much more satisfasting and much tastier!
Seeing 60 lbs of berrys on our kitchen counter was a little overwhelming...yikes that is a lot of work ahead of us. But then my husband, in-laws and mother came to the rescue. With all of us working together we washed, hulled and froze them all in 40 minutes. Now I am sure there are many of professionals working on the Dole Factory line that could of done the same work in half the time but I was impressed with our quick work none the less.
This past week many of those beautiful berries were transformed into yummy Strawberry Jam and beautiful Strawberry Kiwi Jam. Not only is the flavor fantastic but they are picture perfect. They just look yummy.
...Now we are ready for round 2. As those 60 lbs are almost gone. But the jam is ready for our next few shows and internet orders.
"Strawberry Fields Forever"....
Eva keeps bugging me about strawberry picking. I wonder if picking out a basket from the commissary counts.
ReplyDelete