Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Strawberry Picking

After the thunderstorm, on Saturday, the air became very muggy and hot but when Sunday arrived a fresh breeze cleared the sky of clouds while cooling us from the heat of the sun. It was a perfect day!

The morning teas with in the backyard found me on my knees – keeping all the weeds in my garden beds in check… for a little while. I then, cooked up a light storm for our breakfast and yes – we finally made it to the strawberry fields.

They say (who are ‘they’) that one way to save the world is to simply buy locally produced food. If you think about all the pollution caused by transporting mass amounts of produce around the globe then it is easy to see that by supporting local farmers we are cutting down on this type of pollution. I like to take this idea to the next level by participating in the growing or harvesting of the fruits and vegetables I enjoy eating.

To prepare the strawberries for our freezer – so that we can enjoy them until next spring – we simply remove the green stem and leaves and place the strawberry onto a cookie sheet. Once the cookie sheet is full of strawberries we put it into our freezer for about forty minutes. Then the berries are put into large freezer bags and that’s it!

This simple procedure is called ‘flash freezing’. If we had just placed the berries into a bag and then frozen them there would be a great chance that the berries would freeze together as one big block. Imagine how hard it would be to get out a handful of berries for a batch of pancakes if they were all frozen together.

A friend shared this information with me many years ago and now I’m sharing it with you.

Jim

No comments: