Strawberry Pickin'

This is 11 pounds of delicious, local, organic strawberry goodness. Not to be confused with those snobby organic berries you might find at Whole Foods, these are good old fashioned, dirt under your fingernails, slugs and thistles amongst the bushes, tiny little organic berries. They are so small in fact that merely processing them for freezing will give you carpal tunnel because there are 3 times as many stems per pound to remove.

My dear friend Elody, who kept me sane in grad school, invited us out to pick berries with her this weekend. She has this favorite farm she likes to go to, so we were up for trying a new place. Elody's "cute little organic farm out by Everson" was most assuredly 100% organically farmed. One look, I mean, one step through the waist high weeds, and you could clearly see that these folks certainly weren't wasting any time or money on herbicide, fungicide, fertilizer, or say... farm labor. These were clean berries ( in between the slugs, snails, and other gooey farm goodness). Elody, ever the good sport, even got into the spirit with a bit of slug tossing. Go girl!

By the time we each had almost four gallon sized freezer bags of berries, and C was seriously tired of being told not to destroy his berries by tossing his bucket between his hands and swinging it over his head, I spent all of $27 and headed off to get some milk at Breckenridge Farm.

Isn't it cute! This is an old photo from before they opened, they actually have signs now :) These guys were my last client before I took my new job, and they are doing really well. They are hardly keeping up with business. I usually buy their milk from the Starvin' Sams across from my office, but it's freshest at the farm. Since it was Sunday, the store was closed, but luckily Mike was just hopping onto his motorcycle to go check the cows, so I sweet talked him with the magic word "Creamtop" and he let us in. We've been buying the non-homogenized creamtop from them, which no one else makes. It's $2.75 a gallon, and I can pour the cream off the top for my coffee. Talk about a deal!

So, Strawberries and Cream for dessert tonight. And three extra little boys too.