Summer Fruits and Vegetables

[PJ's Mom]

I love making a salad with fresh spinach, tomatoes, cucumber, and basil with lemon juice as the dressing. It's so yummy!

[kittycats_delight]

speaking of summer fruits I spent the day yesterday making jam. We are in full blown fruit season here. Almost everything you can think of is in beginning season, mid season or end season so it is perfect. Made 3 batches of jam yesterday which were strawberry/kiwi (local strawberries are basically over for the year), apricot (just started coming out this past week for harvest), & mixed berries....these come down from the mountains and are just starting too. Need to do a few other types. Pear which is just starting, plum which are about mid season now, peach which are also mid season, and want to do a pineapple/orange one too. Pineapples are just becoming available so maybe in next week will have another jam making day.

[Karen]

Hope you're making enough to share! That's an abundance of fruits all at the same time!

[Karen]

This is a great week at the local supermarket - cheap prices on strawberries, and blueberries and more! I now have two pints of blueberries in the freezer for future use, some in the fridge and 2lbs strawberries I will clean and slice tonight! Wheee!

[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!