Saga of the Strawberries

March, April, and May are the strawberry months in Texas. Everyone goes just a little crazy snapping them up from the local markets since they aren't the tasteless little ping pong balls that get shipped into the grocery stores. My family is not immune to this craze. In fact, I think we got into it a little TOO much this year.

I had snapped up some cheap strawberries at the supermarket with an eye towards making more strawberry jam. 4 pounds of them in fact. Then, my husband declared that it would be a great weekend to go strawberry picking at the local farm and vegetable market. The bonus was that this year, Anthony would be old enough to pick them himself. So we piled into the car and headed down there to meet my mom and dad, who are usually invited to join in whatever family activity we decide to do. We got our buckets from the kid at the store and headed out into the fields.


Picking strawberries with Papa

Once he got the hang of it, he was good to go.


Not bad for a 3 year old!

When we got up to the counter to have them weighed, we had 6, count 'em 6 lbs of strawberries. And the kid was not leaving without his berries. Remember the 4 lbs that I bought earlier in the week? Let's do the math folks. By the end of that Saturday, I had 10 lbs of strawberries in my fridge. Yikes! So we started trying to get rid of them. We took them for snacks at Anthony's birthday party. We made jelly.


There were 6 more of these in the pantry!

We made muffins. We made so many muffins that I took them to work in an attempt to get rid of them.


Mucho muffins

I also made ice cream topping. And finally, I made my FIRST strawberry rhubarb pie. If you don't know what rhubarb is, educate yourself quickly. Google it. You are missing out. There is no picture because it was consumed in the amount of time it took to make it by four strawberry rhubarb pie lovers.