strawbsssss

it’s strawberry season again!!
thanks to my older two insisting on obtaining a public school education, i’m down to only one helper (child laborer), but i would rather be short handed than go on a weekend, along with the rest of the general public.
the place we go is literally four minutes from my house. i timed it. so, hazel and i departed at 8:56 am, to arrive when they opened, on the first available non-weekend u-pick day. the plants were BURSTING with berries. it didn’t take long to fill up our buckets with all the “plump and juicy” (according to hazel) berries.

we made a game of trying to find the perfect specimen. or hilarious specimens.

when i saw we “filled” our buckets, what i mean is, we carefully packed in as many strawberries as possible, utilizing the very same skills learned on gameboy tetris, and perfected when trying to optimize space in the camper. i carried them up to the counter, with berries balanced precariously, knowing that we would never get to the bottom of them before they went bad, but embracing the challenge of getting my money’s worth nonetheless.

we ate a lot of strawberries that day. and of course we made strawberry waffles. and we found an unlikely strawberry lover in ruby.

as usual, we ended up going back for another round of picking. i was happy to pay the premium and just get some prepicked berries, but hazel insisted we be thrifty and pick our own. this time, we had to work a little harder for the perfect berries, but we found that if we went to the far end of all the rows, we still had plenty to choose from.

with this batch of strawberries, we got to work immediately, baking a summer strawberry sheet cake. my girl donned her tiny chef apron and did a great job helping with measuring and cracking eggs and taste testing.

the strawberry sheet cake was so good, especially with a bit of whipped cream.

here’s a link to the recipe on smitten kitchen if you’re curious.

anyways. i think the season is winding down as i type this, and we might be a wee bit strawberried out at this point, but it’s been a good one while it lasted.