Stretch Your Food Dollar: Storing Seasonal Fruit
I love strawberries. Seriously. When I go to the farmers’ market and see the strawberry lady who drives all the way from Oxnard, CA every week, I want to marry her and have her strawberry babies. OK, not really. Oh wait, yes I do!
Strawberries are particularly cheap this time of year. You could get a whole flat of these red beauties at the grocery store for pennies. But how will you use up all that fruit before it starts to rot? I mean, a girl can only eat so many pieces of strawberry shortcake, right?
One way to use up the fruit is to slice it all up, put it in a mixing bowl, sprinkle it with a little sugar, then bag it up in quart-sized storage bags. Label it with the date, then stack these in the freezer. You could also do this with peaches, blueberries, or raspberries. Just be sure to rotate these out of the freezer before they get freezer burn, and you’ll have fruit for smoothies, fruit salads, and sangria.
Homemade jam is another way to utilize seasonal fruit. Here’s an easy recipe from Emeril Lagasse. It will make about 6 jars of jam. If you don’t have jars, you could simply put the jam in little containers and store them in your freezer instead of in the pantry.
Here’s a recipe for Strawberry Shortcake to help you use up some of that frozen fruit later on in the year. Good times, ya’ll! Good times!
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup chilled butter, cut into chunks
1/3 cup half and half, plus more for brushing
1 large egg, beaten
1. Preheat the oven to 425 ° F. Grease a large baking sheet and set aside.
2. Mix together the flour and sugar in your food processor by pulsing it a few times. Add the butter and pulse 10-12 times until the mixture resembles course grains. In another bowl, mix the egg and the half and half. Then add this to the dry ingredients and pulse until it is just mixed.
3. Drop the dough into small biscuits on the greased baking sheet. You should be able to make 6-8 biscuits. Bake 12-15 minutes, until golden brown.
You can serve this with strawberry jam or thawed strawberries on top with a dollop of whipped cream. You could even do this with fresh fruit – I know . . . a radical concept. No matter what way you serve it up, it’s gonna be delicious!
Photo credit: stock.xchng
I am making a cobbler with the peaches I got from the market on Saturday. I am not over the 11 peaches I got for $1.50, but I do need to do something with them. I like the idea of freezing them for smoothies. I think I will actually do that one.
Tamara – I hope you try the cobbler recipe I posted last week. It’s pretty intense. If you sprinkle a little turbinado sugar on the top before it goes into the oven, you get a wonderful crispy topping for the biscuit. I have another recipe that uses a cake mix instead of doing everything from scratch. I can e-mail it to you if you want. Enjoy your peaches!
MMMMmmmmm…Strawberries….I live about 40 miles from Plant City Florida which bills itself as the Strawberry Capital of th world and has an enormouse festival every year when the first berries come in…around March.
Also get to go to Ruskin about 125 miles south …home of the worlds best Tomatoes.
Then up in Hastings and Spuds (yep..real town) halfway towards Jacksonville they have an annual Cabbage and Potato Festival.
Zellwood just north of Orlando has an annual Sweet Corn Festival.
One of the small towns on US 1 along the Atlantic has a Seafood Festival every year.
The problem with all of them is you want to bring home a huge pile of the fresh from the field goodies with no way to eat them all before they become compost material.
Roland, you’re making me a tad bit jealous. We have good produce at the farmers’ market here in Tucson, but it’s not THAT good.
You can freeze fresh corn. Just cut it off of the cob, bag it, and you’re done.
For tomatoes, you could make ketchup, pasta sauce, or just plain diced tomatoes. I don’t have a lobster pot anymore, so bottling isn’t a very efficient option for me. I just pack it all up in little tubs and throw it in the freezer. Plus, you don’t have to worry about botulism. You just have to worry about having enough space.