Strawberry Pickin' and Eatin'

The Friday before Memorial Day Joan and I drove out to Doran's Farm Market to pick strawberries. This is an annual ritual for us, and for two or three days we have strawberry shortcake for much or all of our dinner.

It was supposed to (and did) get hot that day, so we arrived early. We brought our own buckets, which Doran's weighed, but they also supply cardboard baskets for those without.

The signs above the baskets explain the rules of picking, which are also explained out loud by the guy who meets the tractor down by the berries. Most people don't read the signs anyway.

The tractor, which had just delivered some pickers to the berries, returned for another load.

After the briefing everybody starting picking. Of course, you have to sample the berries as you work, and Doran's understands and encourages this.

The flags mark how far up the row the previous picker picked. It's important to carry the flag with you and plant it when you're done, and if you have small kids, to emphasize that it's not a toy. The color of the flag indicates the variety of strawberry; this allows the Doran's representative (in the yellow shirt above) to steer you to different species based on your preferences, such as jam berries versus eating strawberries, or fruity or extra sweet.

Joan found one mutant strawberry. This is the view from the top.

And from the bottom.

The previous couple of weeks had been fairly dry, making the strawberries less likely to rot (or be nibbled by slugs or worms) the instant they touched the mulch. We made quick progress down a pink-flag row and soon realized that if we were going to top it off with berries from a blue-flag row, it was time to move. Then we were done.

The tractor departs for the barn, where you pay, with a load of happy strawberry pickers.

Here are some of our strawberries rinsed, hulled, and sliced.

If you store some in the refrigerator for consumption the next day, do not rinse them (or do anything else). Wet berries are liable to mold or go bad quickly. Joan stores them as-is in a colander loosely covered, so they receive plenty of air circulation in the fridge. Our Friday berries were good for shortcake on Saturday and Sunday as well.

One technique Joan uses is to take out some of the strawberries, give them half the sugar of the overall recipe, and puree them, adding that back in to the bulk of the berries with the other half of the sugar. The proportion is approximate; for the two large servings she gave two cups the puree treatment. Here's a bowl with the puree added back in:

And the final product ... yes, that's what we mean by one serving.

We limit ourselves to one picking expedition each year, for the sake of our waistlines.