It's Strawberry Time! (or it was not so long ago)

I love strawberry season! Most years it seems to fly by with only a few chances to get away and spend some time in the field turning my fingers red. This year I've resolved to make an extra effort both to get out pickin and to also experiment some on what I can do to preserve the berries. If you need help finding a berry farm near you, check out the Pick Your Own website. You How to Pick a Peachcan sort it geographically and it tells you about lots of other produce in addition to strawberries.

I got out at the very beginning of the season and caught an unusually cool and cloudy day for strawberry picking (it even rained). I'm used to it being so hot that I can't pick as many as I want before feeling like I'm going to pass out. Anyhow, I went home with ~10 pounds of fruit.

From there, the adventure of preparing strawberries as many ways as possible started. Of course plenty went straight into our bellies or in fruit salad type dishes. My more labor intensive projects were strawberry sorbet (similar to past recipes) and strawberry jam. (David is taking the finished sorbet out of the ice cream maker in this picture).














I've been reading a book called "How to Pick a Peach" and it has information about the origin of food crops, how choices are made of what varieties are sold in stores, storage information, and recipes. I've found it really interesting in my gardening geek way- but do be warned that people who see you with this particular book will suggest that you just go and pull the peach off the tree.

The strawberry jam recipe sounded exciting to me because you do small steps spread out over 3 nights (as opposed to hours in the kitchen in one day). You sugar the strawberries to soften them. Then the next day you add simple syrup and lemon juice. The final step is to cook the jam until it starts to jelly up a bit and then can it. The whole process went pretty well except that my jam is not so solid. It never set. So there wasn't enough pectin in the fruit alone to do the job. I guess this means I'll have to try another recipe.
Night 1:














Night 3: