Berries, Schedules and Other Aspects of Summer

The tricky thing about the school year ending and open-ended summer beginning is that kids actually do well with structure. Well, my kids do....or maybe I do...its hard to separate that kind of thing...its a little like spaghetti. The good thing is that there is so much change and freedom, both of which are stimulating and make your brain work.

I spend a week or two after school lets out spacing out a little....and just about now the need for routine and normal and order starts to kick in in a driving sort of way. Just sat down with the boys and worked out a new plan for picking up the toys today. Have also been plotting summery field trip type destinations for the next couple of months. Time to make fun, that has a shape and a structure happen....as well as certain necessities like clean toilets and scrubbed hair.

I am doing very well with hitting my goal daily for water consumption and am feeling so proud about that still. Change does happen. People grow and new habits get formed. Tell that to all the people who love to sag around quoting that line about old dogs! Ha! I am making some serious headway on the goal of 8 hours of sleep a night. I am still not hitting it yet but....I have managed to move from the 6 hour range up into the 7's! Every little bit helps and its so fun to see tangible progress.

Strawberry picking round one went down this past weekend and we have almost finished eating the two lugs we brought home. So much love for fresh berries in our family. I hadn't made a single thing with them yet (just watched them being wolfed down out of hand) until tonight when I slammed out a recipe for strawberry pie and popped it in to chill while we ate dinner. So. Good. Strawberries are one of my most favorite foods. If you're looking for a great recipe for your fresh pickins, here's the link to the delicious one I used. Thanks to Michelle over at Gluten Free Fix for sharing it with the world, my boys are all fans now.

Now that the strawberries are almost gone I am starting to think about going back for another round. The boys and I are planning fortifying ideas for the next Daddy Business Trip Week and strawberry picking again together might make it into the calendar. I love going as a family but I love the leisure of going mid-week with just the boys and I....fewer crowds, slower pace, less scheduling to work around. Just have to get those lug boxes cleaned out again!

Strawberry Mama

The strawberries are ripe. We're eating them at every meal now after our big trip the u-pick farm. We always mean to look further afield and one year we went to our CSA's organic field for them but we usually end up at Jones Farm like we did this year. The taste of a field-ripe strawberry is cliche but it still has to be remembered every single year that they are so, so, so much better than the ones we buy in the grocery store all winter to tide ourselves over.

Yesterday I finished putting the last of the jars of freezer jam into the freezer. A joined us around the dining room table this year and helped mash berries and boil pectin with the boys and I. Said he truly had no idea there was exactly that much sugar in jam. Heh. Now you know why I substitute that low-sugar pectin stuff that I buy at Whole Foods, eh buddy?

It does make me feel good to have him start noticing how much sugar is in a given food, not just have me be the food-nazi around the house, always on everyone's case about "feeding the children good things." Nobody likes to be the lone policeman. To be fair though, despite my very wholesome nutritional training there was a time when I was in his shoes, not paying much attention to what went into the jam.

Once as a teen I made jam(one of my favorite summer activities) with one of my best chums whose mom was a devoted naturist hippie type, committed to real foods and the avoidance of processed goods. We'd been out picking wild strawberries together which was all very idyllic and then ended the day in my parents kitchen, with everything we'd picked, intent on making them into jam. My friend balked at the amount of sugar in the recipe and told me that her mom would never go for that....and asked me if we could possibly substitute a smaller amount of honey or fruit juice or even skip the sweetener all together. At the time I didn't exactly get it but here I am, mama of my own domain and retroactively impressed by my friend's scruples and I kinda wish we'd just eaten those little berries raw and fresh instead of boiling the daylights out of them with a wagon load of sugar on top. I hope my own little boys learn the same standards my friend espoused, even when her mom wasn't watching. That's what Pamona's Universal Pectin is all about I guess....at least as far as jam is concerned.

So, there is jam, and there are plenty of "leftover" fresh berries and last night there was even a pie. And for breakfast tomorrow, I'm going to have some strawberries in cream...just a little maple syrup drizzled on top to keep it on the straight and narrow. You haven't lived until you've eaten fresh berries in cream.

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We Be Jammin'!

We picked strawberries this past weekend at our local u-pick strawberry farm. Such a highlight of the year! I always make enough strawberry freezer jam to last us all winter and pretty much every time we get out a new jar we have a conversation about how good the jam is and how when it is June, we'll go pick more together. I am part squirrel, I swear, there's a manic little rodent thing in my soul that is mad for storing away goods. I love to pick and dry and can and freeze and all the other things one can do to fruits and nuts and berries and mushrooms. One of the hardest things about our annual strawberry pick for me is stopping. There are so many berries and I could pick for hours...days maybe, I've never tested my resolve.

When I was a little girl, I always rallied all my younger sisters (all four of them) and marched them down the road with baskets in hand to the top of a meadow on a two-track where wild strawberries grew. We'd pick every last wild strawberry we could find, and then I'd come home with my greedy little hoard of tiny berries and I'd make wild berry jam. My siblings were incredibly tolerant of my driving really, that's love. I hope I didn't injure any of their psyches too deeply, I still think gratefully about their faithful support of my obsession every year when we go picking big, abundant domestic berries.

It was important to the little girl me to be out there in the field on my hands and knees every summer, with all my sisters around me, rolling those tiny red bits into our baskets. I looked forward to it every year, it made me feel frugal and special and I felt really loved by my little sisters for their dedicated picking, even though it wasn't their personal dream. I don't think I could have made wild strawberry jam by myself, but many hands made light enough work that we could pull it off. And I felt like I had rubies in my pantry after I'd jarred up a glittering jar or two, all full of our tiny, hard earned prizes.

 Delicious, and mommy-friendly level of work recipe for the strawberry pie I made with the "leftovers," can be found right here!

I was lucky to marry a man who loves fresh fruit and u-picking almost as much as I do. He's absorbed my foraging love and eats my canned goods with gusto. (I love you A!) He marks strawberry season and cherry season and peach picking in his calendar and makes sure that we schedule each picking event. And my little boys have now the joined the team, energetic pickers, even little Nib plucking berries and saying smilingly "Hep! Hep!" ( Baby-speak for "I help, Mommy!") And my squirrel-mommy heart swells. Such a good life.