Homemade bread

Homemade peanut butter

Homemade strawberry jam

Homemade ohmygoodness

My homemade trifecta of perfection

Eliza fed herself some pumpkin

Marion did her best Black (Bean) Beard impression

And I had the chance to make three more jars of apple pectin for my small batch canning experiments!

No, not that kind of strawberry shortcake (although it was mighty delicious!)

This kind of strawberry shortcake!

Our first (and certainly not last, not by a long shot!) picking trip of the spring/summer

Mondays are usually our hang around the house, recover from the weekend, tackle the laundry monster mountain kind of days

But we were blessed with a gorgeous Monday and an update from Froberg’s Farm on their facebook page that said they still had lots and lots of berries

So we indulged my spur of the moment quirkiness and packed up and headed off to the farm

(As a side note, the farm isn’t that far away from our house and it’s not really in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn’t like I had to pack, you know, necessities, but one thing I’ve learned as a mom of two is that even the smallest excursion with a baby and a toddler requires packing skills like you’re heading up Everest. And trip out of the house that has less than two bags is a packing light trip.)

Also, toddlers don’t really get that you shouldn’t hurl the strawberries into the buckets. At least I got her to toss them in underhanded.

hehe

This year, unlike last, the weather was gorgeous and the berries were every.where. We picked our first bucket in less than fifteen minutes.

And that was even with the toddler doing most of the work!

I had to tell her to reign in her enthusiasm. This is only one of four different picks I have planned this year (see folks, this is why you have kids. Fieldhands.)

How the Bean spent the first half of the day

And the second half

Making her Granny face

She was Pouty McPoutsALot that I wouldn’t let her put all that great dirt and grass in her face

This year Froberg added a great picnic area, so luckily, I had the foresight (for probably one of the only times in my life) to pack us a little picnic lunch

Hey, no strawberries!

When lunch was over, she wanted to go goof off. Then wanted to go pick more strawberries.

So I obliged and we picked another gallon of berries. In another fifteen minutes. I’m not lying when I said berries were everywhere.

One week later, we found ourselves back in the fields. This time with friends!

And Eliza Jane found herself parked back in the middle of the row

Mar got to carry her own bucket this time

That’s about as perfect a strawberry as you can imagine

Oh yes, sitting in the middle of a strawberry row, feeding my baby girl, and still picking strawberries. I’m just that talented.

So, strawberries down (although don’t be surprised if we make another trip or two down there this month), blueberries and peaches still to come and a hopeful new pick for us this year, blackberries!

And the strawberry shortcake picture above, if you’re interested, are Confections of a Foodie Bride’s homemade vanilla wafers, fresh strawberries, homemade whipped cream, and a drizzle of homemade strawberry syrup

The basic bread recipe, with the addition of thyme and oregano.

Just when I thought I couldn’t perfect the already perfect grilled cheese, I found out I was wrong. Herbed bread, one slice extra sharp cheddar, one slice extra sharp white cheddar and a slice of Jarlsberg. Done up in a cast iron skillet, of course.

I learned the secret of a perfect grilled cheese from my papaw. Although according to him, it wasn’t a perfect grilled cheese unless it was on sourdough bread. The key, low heat and long cooking time. A perfectly good grilled cheese can’t be rushed. You rush it, you end up with un-melted cheese and burnt bread. To this day, I can’t eat a grilled cheese without being reminded of my grandfather (and I think all his grandkids would say the same.)

Perfection I tell you.

Enhanced only by the addition of homemade tomato soup

That, my friends, is about as a perfect a lunch as you could ever want.

I’m going to bake my way through Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Now, this book has close to a hundred recipes (I gave up counting at sixty) so I’m making no promises I’ll be done by the end of the year, but I’ll at least be working through it. Also, I’ll go on and say right now one of the recipes is for fish stew, and I can promise you that I’m not making that one. And maybe that olive bread. I loathe olives. We’ll see. Okay, maybe I’ll just make the recipes that look good to me.

What a resolution, right?

But do you really want to argue with a resolution so tempting as this?

So recipe 1/100(?) done!

This is the basic boule recipe the book starts out with and while you can tinker with it, why would you? It’s just about perfect as written. I have found I like to decrease the baking time by about seven minutes and I really like to not rinse out my bucket to get a head start on the sourdough taste for a new batch. (If you buy the book, which I highly recommend, you’ll understand.)

While one of my resolutions is to not gain 100 pounds from this resolution, I’ve found that halving the recipe and baking it in a loaf pan gives about 20 slices (2 WW points a slice.) Which is the perfect amount for a weekend of sandwiches for our little family. The recipe is extremely easy to halve or to double and it bakes up wonderfully, half, whole or doubled.

So who thinks this is a resolution I can really keep? (And who has hips that wish I wouldn’t keep this one!)

So worth it, that we’ve been three times this season. I think (if I remember correctly) we’ve picked a total of about twelve pounds of blueberries. Marion probably ate about six pounds while we were out picking.

Moorhead is great for several reasons, one of the top being that they don’t use pesticides on their berries, so they’re safe for the littles to eat right of the bushes. There’s no better way to keep a toddler occupied for an hour at a time by giving them free reign to all the blueberries they can handle!

I took the camera each time we went picking, but I was pretty focused on filling my bucket, so there’s a mix of iPhone photos and camera photos from our three trips.

Marion’s first blueberry bucket

Really, is there anything cuter than an army of toddlers toting gallon sized buckets?

The look of delight on her face says it all.

Our first trip was at the start of the season, so the picking wasn’t so great, especially with littles in two. We left that day with about 2.5 lbs I think.

Our next trip up, with Megan and Tracey, went a lot better! As evidenced by this sucker the size of my thumbnail

Megan went back and got the girls their own buckets, thinking maybe they could “help.” Marion just transferred berries from my bucket to hers, sat down, and ate them. Some help.

Nom nom nom

Doesn’t get any fresher than that

Megan and Tracey

It’s hard to make forward progress when all your work is being eaten.

Our “helper” elves

One of the most toddler friendly things about blueberry bushes is that the ripe berries really just fall off into your hand. The not so ripe berries take work to get off the branches, so you don’t really have to worry about them eating too many unripe berries.

Showing Tracey how it’s done

Our much better almost five pound bounty from that trip.

Blueberry picking is exhausting!

And no pictures from our third trip out with Kelly and Leo. We were there to do some serious picking and came home with a little over five pounds.

So what do you do with almost twelve pounds of blueberries?

You help make delicious blueberry muffins

Nothing like a blueberry muffin with a side of blueberries

Make lots of blueberry jam

You eat blueberries with fresh homemade whipped cream

You also make a dozen blueberry mini pies, six personal blueberry crips and eat your weight in blueberries!

And after reading the website and seeing that they still have blueberries, I’m not ruling out a fourth trip this year!

The biggest struggle of the day was convincing her to put the berries in the bucket and not in her mouth!

It was a little late in the season, but there were still some good berries around

And even though we filled up the bucket, she still wouldn’t let me carry it

Such a big helper!

Our bounty. And in case you didn’t believe she was a berry devouring monster, these lasted us less than a week.

All of the rest of the photos were taken with a super cool iPhone app called Hipstamatic. So yes, they’re supposed to look that way.

And now, my confession. As we were checking out, one of the workers came by with a flat of berries, marked $2.00. I asked the cashier if it was $2.00 for the whole flat and she said yes, they were close to being overripe and so they wanted to sell them before they spoil. Well the ripest berries make the best jam, so I jumped on it. I gave away as many as I kept and this is still what I was left with

Just in case you were wondering what EIGHT POUNDS of strawberries looks like! I think it took me close to three hours to wash and hull all of them.

And on the picking plans for the summer, blueberries and peaches at the end of June!

First up, my contributions. Josh went out for a bike ride and Miss Mar was feeling sicky (*another* ruptured ear drum, bah) so she was happy to ride around on my back while I tried out another new recipe.

Homemade Oatmeal Granola Bars. Yes oatmeal, see a pattern here?

That’s some serious amazing deliciousness. Both mama, dada and Marion approved! Modifications were that I ran out of honey, so only had 1/3 c instead of 2/3 c. So I went with 3 tbsp of honey instead of just 2. And added extra raisins since Marion loves them. The texture on these is amazingly perfect. They don’t crumble at all, which makes them a great snack for the car. They’re firm enough to hold their shape, but chewy enough that you can easily bite them. These are going to be a household staple from here on out for sure.

Josh also had time to play with his new birthday present

A new grill, yay!

And dinner, yum!

Thanks to the wonder of slow burning charcoal and a nice bike ride, he also had time to clean his bike.

Aided by Daddy’s little helper, of course.

Grease monkey is going to get you!

A few mornings ago, I was making Marion her “moat-meal” in the morning (which I can finally stomach doing again, just barely) and I looked on the lid of the Quaker Oats tub. For the first time, I notice they had a recipe for well, oatmeal raisin cookies. I probably had seen it before, but never noticed it because I actually hate oatmeal raisin cookies. I mean, fruit in cookies? What’s the point? Unless it’s jam. Then it make sense, but other than that, there’s no point in having fruit in cookies.

Like I said though, pregnancy is a funny thing. And all of a sudden, Ginger decided mama wanted oatmeal raisin cookies.

One trip to the grocery store later …

I was ready to bake my few oatmeal raisin cookies. And thanks to my friends Megan and Chelsea for telling me you can easily put chocolate chips in them. Chocolate chips in cookies make so much more sense than fruit.

Oh. Yum.

Done just in time to have an after work backyard picnic with dada!

Marion’s first cookie!

Don’t worry, she got the raisin version, not the chocolate chip one! Those are for mama alone!

Recipe here, or on the lid of a tub of Quaker Oats oatmeal. Knock another item off my 100 in 2010 list too!

At least I had this super cute supervisor! She colored and ate pears while I cooked; I say we’re a pretty good team!

Yum, yum, and yummier. Recipe here. One small note, I’d pour the pancake batter in first, let it set up just a bit, then put the pear ring in the middle. Otherwise, the pear burns pretty quickly.

They were a pretty big hit