Strawberry Picking

Slag and I made our annual strawberry picking trip. Aren't they lovely? They're just loaded with luscious strawberry essence. The berries are a lot smaller this year, but they taste better. I know because the eating started while we were washing them. Then I had an enormous celebratory bowl of berries with whipped cream. Now I'm almost too full to stay vertical. I want to lie on the couch and digest, but there are hundreds of berries left to be processed. Each berry must be individually examined to determine which category it goes into:

- Some sit out another day or two to ripen a little more.
- Some get eaten immediately.
- Some get refrigerated to be eaten over the next week and then frozen if we can't eat them all before they start getting old.
- Some get frozen immediately.

It's a very rigorous protocol and the subtle differences among the categories can be hard to master. Slag participates in the picking and washing, but he wisely leaves the classification step to me. He doesn't quite have the nuances among the categories down and puts berries in the wrong pile, which messes up everything.

(Don't worry. Slag will be in charge of the peaches when we pick those in July. I defer to him on peach categories, so it all evens out.)

It's a perfect excuse to make real pink lemonade. I just learned a few months ago that real pink lemonade is not lemonade with red food coloring in it. It's lemonade made with some kind of red berry.

It's really easy. Boil 2 cups of water, 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of chopped strawberries (fresh or frozen) just until the sugar is dissolved and the fruit is soft and loses its bright color. Strain the fruit out of the mixture and let it cool. Then add 1 cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice and 2 cups of cold water.

In light of the current strawberry abundance, I used more berries than the recipe calls for in this batch, so the lemonade came out a lot pinker than normal. I haven't tried it yet, but I think it would be really good with vodka. Yum.