strawberry pie

Elsie had us up real nice and early on Saturday morning encouraging us to seize the day. So we did! With our sleepy eyes and some of us still in pajamas, we loaded into the car to go and pick strawberries.

We went to Silkey Gardens, our favorite place to pick for our third year in a row. I was almost nine months pregnant the first time I came, pictured here. And then last year we came in the evening with two kids contained in strollers. No strollers this year!

The picture above might lead you to believe that Elsie was a helpful picker. And actually, she was a tremendous picker and an equally skilled eater. I nearly begged the woman at the end to please charge us more because we definitely ate more than our share while picking, but instead she just took a picture of Elsie's face. The evidence was there, but the owner didn't seem to mind a bit.

Ivar was a great picker and at one point he stood up tall as if struck by the best idea of his life and screamed, "Oh I know! We can make strawberry pie!!!" Nearly every picker in the field looked up to see if he had been yelling the good idea to them. He was so loud, and so excited.

And so that's what we did. On Sunday, while Elsie was napping Ivar and I made a strawberry pie. It was my Aunt Louie's recipe and it was delicious. The recipe was easy peasy, but took a bit of time because Ivar could eat the strawberries as quickly as I could cut the stems off. He was delighted the whole time, and I started to wonder if he didn't believe this was the first strawberry pie ever made. Like it was his own genius, original idea.

But no matter whose original idea the strawberry pie was, it was for sure genius. We sat at the picnic table and ate the whole pie, just the four of us. At one point Rory said, "Ivar, you want more?" And Ivar stuck out his tummy and said, "No, because I might get a big tummy ache!"

Afterwards Rory said, "I don't know if this is just the sugar talking, but this is one of my favorite moments ever since we moved here."

And then, last night after the kids went to bed we turned the last of the strawberries in to strawberry jam. We were looking for recipes that used raw honey as the sweetener, but we needed a special kind of pectin and other ingredients that we didn't have in the cupboard. So we went with the original recipe: four cups of strawberries to seven cups of sugar. That's right: seven. People. That is insane. I actually think I got diabetes just by measuring out the sugar. But I'll tell you what. It tastes delicious. And is going to make for one mighty fine pbj.

I wanted to make freezer jam so we could skip the canning, but Rory wouldn't have it. So together we canned eight half pints of jam. It made for a sweet late night date night in the kitchen.

So strawberry weekend was a success.

Elsie can't say strawberry. She says, "blaa blaa" while sort of rolling her tongue. It's hilarious and not even close to strawberry. But we all know what she means so it's effective. I'm pretty positive she is about to say in the picture below, "Mo Blaa Blaa peas!"