Tag: strawberries

Strawberries are Here!

 

Every year I really look forward to the changing seasons and enjoying certain foods at their peak, in-season best. Asparagus and rhubarb herald the beginning of spring of course and provide some much-needed colour and hope, but for me, nothing compares to the luscious, once-a-year taste of fresh strawberries.

Like tomatoes, I used to forget each year how desperately terrible a January strawberry is going to be. Tumbling across the miles in order to garnish a dessert plate (which already makes me feel like a privileged brat), these ruby-faced imposters, often unyielding to the teeth, taste like tiny turnips (or worse, nothing at all) and are eerily white at their inner core.

So for many years now, this has culminated in a no (fresh) strawberries edict here, once the season is over. 

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Talkin’ About My Maceration

 

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It’s become very fashionable to make a big statement about eating “locally” and “seasonally” but many of us have been doing this as a matter of common sense for years. Strawberries, for example; obviously, they are available year round but how to compare a strawberry that arrives in the grocery store pale and grumbly from all that travelling with the sweet, deeply red jewels we’re savoring this month?

(And, unlike their winter counterparts, these summer fellows do not have the unfortunate texture of a raw potato).

Even within the (almost daily, I confess) samplings of strawberries that I have been eating there’s a wide swoon factor between local and really local; these are the almost black-red, luscious little pillows that have no hint of tartness and adding cream or cake or anything else seems to impinge on their pure, clean taste.

There’s nothing like them is there?

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