strawberries galore

Over last weekend, we made a trip to our local strawberry farm (only about 5 miles from our house...that's local!)  The berries were plump and beautifully red.  Ripe for the picking!

Fortunately, I brought along the hired help. Their payment: strawberry jam, strawberry ice cream, strawberry lemonade, strawberry lemon sorbet, and strawberry lemon popsicles

They picked and picked, inspecting each berry, likely trying to decide whether to eat or whether to add to the slow accumulation in their buckets.

They found a few unusual growths on some of the strawberries, and made silly jokes, mostly of the bathroom humor variety.  (Ah, life with 3 boys...)

Elizabeth won the most unusual strawberry award with her "Japanese fan" strawberry.

But when we arrived home, the real work began.  I spent about 8 hours in the kitchen on Saturday between the strawberries, meals and another project I'm working on.  But we will have lots of strawberry goodness through the summer, fall and winter for my labors!  I canned regular strawberry jam, strawberry vanilla jam, strawberry lemonade concentrate (which rendered a question a day asking when we can open those jars), and just when I thought I was done, Paulie requested a small batch of strawberry kiwi jam.

How could I deny a jam-making request from one of my littles!  So I made a small 3 jar batch of strawberry kiwi jam, using the same fruit ratios on the Pomona pectin box but with 3 cups crushed strawberries, 1 cup crushed kiwi, 1 1/2 cups of sugar.  I love the little black kiwi seeds you can see in the jam.  We already sampled one of the strawberry kiwi jars of jam over fresh baked sourdough, delicious!