Is there anything prettier than a flat of fresh Fragaria ananassa, right from the market?
Our farmer informs us that this is probably it, as the berries remaining in his field are getting too ripe to pick, so Saturday is iffy. This is our third flat of the season, so we’ve had our share. In these parts, strawberry season starts up around Memorial Day, as asparagus season is waning. Here at the summer solstice, it’s about finished. Pretty glorious 3 ½ weeks. Helps that it coincides with the best weather of the year.
But what to do with all those beauties? Ya gotta hull ‘em*, as that green stem piece adds no flavor to the experience. Then, ya just pop ‘em in your mouth! I know, you can only eat so many strawberries at a setting, but it’s a great challenge! But with a little preparation, some wonderful taste treats are at hand.
Of course, the classic early summer delight is strawberry shortcake: fresh berries in their juice over a warm biscuit with some whipped cream on top. You can’t get this at Baskin-Robbins. My wife and I have tinkered with the standard berry prep, which is to douse them with sugar till they give up some juice. She doesn’t like really sweet things (except me), so we’re always working to reduce sugar. She came across how you could substitute balsalmic vinegar, no less, and still get the juice extraction. And, no, you don’t taste the vinegar at all. This berry prep is useful in other recipes, and freezes well.
Good shortcake is key, and warm fresh out of the oven is even better. The recipe we use is pretty simple.
If you can’t get your hands on Bisquick, here’s how you can make it.
The coached nutrition program Kathy’s followed since February, which has her slimmed down to the girl I married, avoids high glycemic foods, and flour’s a real bad actor there. Cauliflower rice, something you make by buzzing florets in the Cuisinart, can substitute – well – for many of those starchy treats (1). Turns out you can even make biscuits with it.
Can you ever get tired of strawberry shortcake? Well, if you’re looking for a little variety on the dessert front during strawberry season, there are options. Both involve bringing in that misunderstood first-of-the-season vegetable, Mr. rhubarb. Its striking color blends well with the berries, as does its bitter taste. Not one for the kiddos.
For the lazy cook, there’s this one. A little ice cream on top can help it along.
If you want to get fancy and make an actual crust, there’s nothing like a strawberry-rhubarb pie.
And how about a salad? The late Stuart McLean, CBC raconteur, blessed us with this recipe, something we look forward to making this time of year every year. Who wouldn’t want some sweet nuts with their spinach, especially of there were some strawberries on top?
If you tire of chewing your strawberries, there are a couple ways (that I know) of drinking them.
Frozen daiquiris are always a crowd pleaser. Wait till you see what you’ve got when you make them with strawberries! For a dinner party last month, I poured out the whole batch straight from my blender into a glass half-gallon milk bottle, doling the magic red sluice to each guest’s empty glass. Let us say the crowd was pleased.
Helps if you freeze down the berries first.
The last one requires a little patience, as to make the required strawberry-infused vodka you need to watch it sit there on the shelf for 5 days. After that, it’s easy peasey. And the infused vodka is a tasty drink in its own right. One of the ways we’ll be “preserving” our latest flat of berries.
Well worth the wait.
The alcohol content of the final drink is about 42 proof, about the same as cosmopolitan. Drink up!
When I was writing this yesterday, I totally forgot a great way to “preserve” those berries for a time when you want to taste a little summer but it’s bleak outside. My Grandma Slater, just like Greg Brown’s, put it all in jars (2). I love my grandma’s strawberry jam. I still have some jars of it in my freezer, and Grandma died 35 years ago. Of course, she taught her daughters the recipe, and it was my Aunt Dorie who made the batch I’ve got. She’s only been gone 20 years. With my wife’s absent sweet tooth, we rarely have occasion to spread the stuff we’ve got, let along make more. When I decided to add jam to the list of strawberry destinations, I went looking for the recipe. Not in Mom’s box or the oilcloth bond cookbook she put together for the Hamilton Circle of the Grandville Methodist Church in 1960. Neither of my Aunt Dorie’s crammed boxes contained a jam recipe. I remember those Slater women kept some of their best recipes in their heads. Summer after my freshman year, I used to stay with Grandma when I went up to visit my girlfriend Rosie in Grand Rapids. I got Grandma to tell me how she made it. It was so simple I had to go and tell Rosie. As we sat in Grandma’s living room, I told her: ”berries, mash ‘em, add some sugar and voilá”. Grandma overhead us and shouted from the kitchen “don’t forget the Sure-Jel” (pectin). Rosie loved the jam, too, but never tried to make me any.
Looking for the recipe, I had to check Joy of Cooking, where a lot of the simpler recipes are very similar to the ones the Slater ladies cooked. But the jam recipe there was much more complicated than what I remember. But Dr. Google came through with something that looks mighty close, and here it is:
Technical notes.
Handling the bounty. Faced with a fine full flat of berries, that challenge becomes what to do with them all. A flat holds 8 quarts. That’s a lotta berries. Fresh berries will last about a week, even if kept cool. Kept in sealed containers in the ‘fridge, you might get an extra week. A tragedy when the little wonders go mushy. So the estimate is how many we’re gonna eat now and how to protect the rest. Fortunately, the only thing the berry loses in the freezer it its plump resilience. Flavor and color survive. My vacu-sealer does not squoosh the berries when I pack them. So you can pack them whole or sliced, looking to use them like regular berries when you thaw them later. We pack a lot of them up as if for strawberry shortcake. That same prep works for drinks. As I type this, my wife is out buying a large bottle of vodka so we can infuse some more with our berries. We bought two flats today and they’ll be safely packed away (or eaten) before sundown.
*Hulling. The only non-joy in acquiring a bunch of fresh strawberries in the need to hull the little bastards. This pain-in-the-ass step is necessary to remove the dried-up green remnants of the flower that produced the fruit. For you botanists out there, there are several names for the structures you’re removing (see figures(3)). When you’re swearing, it always helps to name names. You can pinch ‘em off, but that’s messy and your fingers quickly attain a lovely red hue. A paring knife can do it, but you lose a bit of that precious berry flesh with each circumcision. Kathy and I stumbled on a tool made just for this task, and it does a bang-up job: picks the hull off the berry slicker than snot off a doorknob, as Kathy likes to say. Six bucks on Amazon, and well worth it (4).
References
1. How to make cauliflower rice. Minimalist Baker. https://minimalistbaker.com/how-to-make-cauliflower-rice/
2. Greg Brown. Canned Goods. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv6Q58RLSwc
3. What part of the strawberry is the hull? Quora. https://www.quora.com/What-part-of-a-strawberry-is-the-hull
4. LIANGKEN Strawberry Huller. Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/LIANGKEN-Strawberry-Pineapple-Vegetables-Stainless/dp/B08JLDMHNV/ref=sr_1_6?crid=3BKY0C3ILCL34&keywords=strawberry+huller+tool&qid=1687369687&sprefix=huller%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-6
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