Summer Fruits and Vegetables

[cassiesmom]

I saw strawberries at Meijer tonight, I think they were two or three boxes for $5. The problem for me is that they're so perishable that I can't use the whole box. I love them but I wish I could get them in a smaller quantity.

[Karen]

What you can do is like I did, sit and clean and slice the whole batch, slice 'em up, and put them in a bowl in the fridge with a sprinkling of sugar on the top, and they keep better that way. If I had too much, I'd freeze some of them to use in backing later, but I know I will eat the whole batch over the next few days.

[Karen]

I wanted to add one more tip for large quantities of strawberries. If you ever want to bake with them later, another way to deal with them is clean, dehull, and then slice the strawberries and lay the slices flat on a piece of wax paper laid on a cookie sheet. Then freeze until solid, and you can shake or peel them off and keep them in a plastic bag with the air sucked out in the freezer. They soften when being baked anyway, so the texture difference won't be at all noticeable in the finished product.

This also works for blueberries, raspberries, and the like - they don't even need to be sliced, just wash em off, let em dry a bit, spread on cookie sheet and freeze! Rhubarb can be sliced into 1-inch chunks and frozen, a rhubarb pie is like s lice of summer in the dead on winter!