Slow Reads and Good Eats: Strawberries
Four Fifths a Grizzly inspired food
“Strawberries are designed to encourage animals to eat them. But do they need to be this scrumptious to accomplish that? It seems as if they were only two thirds or even half as yummy, you’d still go after them.” - Douglas Chadwick.
One of our favourite chapters in Four Fifths a Grizzly is “Ode to a Strawberry” (see this episode). The whole time reading this mouth watering chapter we craved the delicious little morsels.
Strawberries certainly don’t need any help being delicious. But they absolutely make most any dessert taste better.
And speaking of dessert… here is the confection Katherine talked about in this episode:
STRAWBERRY-ORANGE ICE
(Source: Canadian Living August 1980)
Ingredients:
415 ml (1 3/4 cups) orange juice
125ml (1/2 cup) lemon juice
500 mL (2 cups) strawberries, hulled
415 ml (1 2/4 cups) sugar
.5ml (1/8 tsp) salt
Put all ingredients in blender and blend all ingredients at high speed until smooth.
Pour mixture into a 13x9-inch baking pan.
Cover with foil or plastic wrap and put in freezer until partially frozen
After 3 hours transfer the mixture to a large bowl and beat with a hand mixer for about a minute.
Return mixture to pan and freeze until firm, about 3 hours. For easier scooping and serving, remove mixture from freezer and let stand at room temperature for 10 minutes.
Makes 20, 1/2 cup servings.
We hope you enjoyed this opportunity to enjoy some Slow Eats. What is your favourite strawberry treat? (besides just eating them right off the plant, that is! 😋) Please share your best recipes in the comments below!
Until next time, we hope you have many opportunities to savour tasty eats and (of course) Slow Reads.
Your friends,
Katherine and Manon
P.S. Just to geek out a bit on botany…. strawberries are not actually berries, they are really a fruit. Well, accessory fruit actually (which means the fruit does not come from the ovary of the flower but from the receptacle (the base of the flower, the part where the flower is attached to the stem).
Ok, now it’s going to get weirder… the yummy, sweet flesh of the strawberry is not actually the fruit - this part is called “accessory tissue." The fruit is the hard part around each of the seeds. So, in essence, each strawberry is hundreds of fruits contained within a sweet pulp of “accessory tissue.”