Strawberry Picking June 23, 2010

This past weekend, McGee#1 and I took a mini-vacation. We were celebrating the start of his 2 years doing lab research (I call it an attempt to imitate me) and therefore the start of 2 years where he sleeps at home almost every night and doesn’t have to do any 24 hr calls.

The plan was to go strawberry picking. And can I just say, strawberries are completely and absolutely beautiful! I had no idea!

strawberries

They are actually much harder to pick that I expected. But they are delicious to eat right off the vine, I think I ate quite a few more than I picked. We were told that to get our money’s worth, we should pick a minimum of 10 pounds. Being naive city folks, we followed the orders…

This is only 5 pounds, the other 5 are on the other side of the backseat...

Now, the real problem was that we didn’t plan this very well. We went strawberry picking on a friday but we were only returning to the city on a saturday. Therefore the strawberries were in our bed and breakfast room overnight. Thankfully, they survived and we slept with the fresh sent of strawberries all night!

So what do you do with 10 pounds of strawberries when you arrive home to your very small 1 bedroom nyc apt?

1. You distribute as much as you can to your neighbors and friends and

2. make strawberry ice cream.

3. Frantically decide what to do with whatever you have left.

I couldn’t decide which ice cream recipe I liked better, so I made two different recipes (both of which I doubled, due to the massive amounts of strawberries available). I used this recipe that calls for eggs and I used the recipe that came with my ice cream maker that uses only heavy cream (that recipe can be found at the bottom of this post). I liked the one without eggs better because it was so much easier to make, but both turned out really good.

our freezer

You can also see we froze some strawberries for smoothies.

And the best part about these fresh strawberries, other than the fact that it made me wish I lived somewhere where I could have a garden and grow fresh fruits, it that I ate them for breakfast every morning with greek yogurt.

strawberries and yogurt

Since I couldn’t find a nice transition, come back tomorrow for waterfalls and rodeos.

~ Inna

ps – How do you like your strawberries?

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

2 pints fresh strawberries

3/4 cup of sugar

1 cup heavy cream

2 teaspoons of lemon juice

Wash and hull strawberries, puree in a blender or food processor with sugar, add lemon juice and whipping cream. Let mixture chill in fridge (at least 4 hrs). Pour into ice cream maker and follow manufacturers instructions.

Advertisement