Strawberries

Spring is prime strawberry season in East Texas, so we met Aunt Missy at Grandma's kitchen to do some preserves. Grandma and Josh drove down to Nacogdoches, TX early Saturday to fill up the van with 70 (count them, 70!) quarts of strawberries. Well...20 quarts were for other people, but 50 is still a pretty big number!

There were strawberries all over Grandma's kitchen, and red juice all over the bathroom sink as well. It took us the rest of the morning to prep the strawberries. Grace and Uncle Sean had passed on a trick they learned in class about using a straw (no pun intended) up through the bottom to remove the white core and the stem. It worked really well, and even helped us spot a few worms (yummm, protein) - better still, no sore fingernails! We did 20 quarts of frozen Splenda strawberries for Grandma and us, and 80 jars of preserves for Aunt Missy's family. By the last batch, our tootsies sure were sore but we were pros at it.

We're going back for blueberries and purple hull peas this summer!