the wizard of ounce: strawberry smorgasbord 2012

Oranges, schmoranges. Florida is strawberry country!! When we moved here three years ago, all I knew about fruit in Florida was oranges, which, frankly, I'm not that into. So imagine how excited I was to learn that in fact Florida is one of the top producers of strawberries, has one of the longest (and earliest) strawberry seasons, and that the "Winter Strawberry Capital of the World" is about an hour from here in Plant City. While I have thoroughly enjoyed the strawberries each year, this year we finally went to the infamous Strawberry Festival (also in Plant City) with some wonderful friends who live down that way. I was less than impressed with the rides, games, festival part of it, but super excited to eat as many strawberries as I could hold. At the festival I had chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry lemonade, strawberry cookies and strawberry cobbler. We skipped the strawberry shortcake (this is the item I kept seeing featured on the news) because the lines were just too long. Maybe next year. Besides, I am of the opinion that premade cake and cool whip can't compare to homemade pound cake and fresh made whipped cream.

I also bought some strawberry butter as a souvenir, which I have not opened yet, but looks fantastic. And no, I don't have any clue what strawberry butter actually is. I'm guessing kind of like apple butter but with strawberries? Although it looks suspiciously like strawberry jam.... My plan is to try it on english muffins for breakfast, but not until I can't get fresh strawberries any more.

Speaking of fresh strawberries, one of my favorite memories as a kid (and she won't believe this, because it wasn't my favorite at the time) was going strawberry picking with my mom. My memory is probably exaggerated, but I remember being out there for hours, filling as many buckets as we could carry, and eating as many as we could sneak when the farmers weren't looking. We also had so many that the fridge would be full of gallon buckets of strawberries, and eventually they would get past ripe and my mom would use them for different things, my personal favorite being strawberry glaze pie.

There are a lot of pick-your-own citrus farms around our house, but I haven't seen any pick-your-own strawberries, so I bought a flat of strawberries on the way out of the festival. Yes, a flat. This is the equivalent of 12 of the containers you buy at the supermarket. That's too many strawberries for two people to eat, you say. Yes, yes, it is. But I couldn't resist. They were selling the flats for $7! And actually, if I had held out for 100 more yards, I could have bought them from the boy scouts for $6, which I would have much preferred. Alas, I definitely didn't need two flats.

But the moral of the story is that when you have that many strawberries, you can't just cut them up and eat them in your cereal in the morning. They won't last. So I spent the last week and a half making every single recipe I could find to use up the strawberries. Luckily this happened to fall at the perfect time, during my spring break, so I was actually super motivated to bake at home (sometimes when I get home from school I just do not feel like cooking or baking at all). My two favorites were the strawberry-peach crumble and the strawberry sorbet. And the best part about the sorbet is that it will last quite a while in the freezer. And now that I have finally finished the entire flat, I am relieved, but a little sad. And I will keeping buying strawberries until the season is over. And probably for a while after.

Oh, and a quick story to serve as evidence that sometimes too much of a good thing can start to be a bad thing. One of the nights during the smorgasbord, I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic because I couldn't find my phone or the strawberries I had brought to bed with me. It took me jumping out of bed, turning on the lights, and pulling all the covers and pillows off the bed for a solid five minutes for my brain to pull itself out a sleep-induced fog and realize that I had, in fact, not brought any strawberries to bed to snuggle. On a normal day, that might be the obvious answer. These were not normal days. These were strawberry days.