Strawberries!!

It's strawberry season!! June has always meant strawberries to me, when I was little we used to go across the river on the ferry to pick strawberries for the year. I think we kids ate as many as we picked. We would freeze some, but mostly my mom would make jam. I remember waking up for school in the morning and the house would smell like strawberries, we would use the freezer jam skimmings for our toast and it was delicious. I can't imagine June without strawberry picking and now we continue this tradition in our family, even before we had kids S and I would go picking.

Yesterday my mom, E and I went picking and came home with seven buckets - our first picking day of the season. Most of these - the ones we manage to keep E from eating - will be frozen for year round smoothies. Last year we froze about 100 pounds as strawberry is our favourite kind of smoothie and we do not like to run out, this year we will freeze even more. Thanks to Katherine's great idea about freezing berries in the plastic salad containers we now get them stacked nicely in our freezer with about 5 1/2 pounds in each container. The boys also want to make more jam this year, I make freezer jam with dried pineapple as the sweetener and they will make regular jam using Pomona's Pectin (which I love for jam making because you don't have to use much sweetener so the flavour of the fruit come through). I love that for around $1.50 a pound and a bit of effort we can have the taste of summer all year round - cause, really somethings are just too good to only be enjoyed once a year.

One the menu for this morning....waffles with strawberries of course.