strawberry picking

After days of rain, this weekend brought sunshine and blue skies for one brief, glorious day. And what better way to harvest the sunshine than to pick strawberries? On Saturday morning, we rubbed the sleep from our eyes, fueled up with breakfast, slathered on the sunscreen, and headed out to the fields. I love strawberries. Evelyn loves them too. I had it in my head that she would scamper around in the fields with my nephew and that she would be able to wait, at least until we got in the car, to eat the berries. Ha ha…I have no idea what I was thinking. As soon as she caught a glimpse of the bright red among the leaves, she said, ‘ohhhh, berries,” which sounds more like bay-eez. There was no stopping her. She was picking them out of my basket just as quickly as I could put them there. When I moved the basket out of her reach, she started picking them on her own, eating stems and all, and even picking up squashed ones from the ground. In the end, I had to keep giving them to her to prevent her from eating the really yucky ones on the ground. She ate berries for the full hour or so that we were there.

Picking your own berries is incredibly inexpensive, so we picked a lot. I suppose my eyes were bigger than my stomach and after we got them all home, I was hit with a slight panic about what in the world I would do with all of them. I scoured the internet for some healthy ideas and ended up with these:

Dried