Thursday, June 10
Foster, WI
On Thursday we held our first (and possibly only) Great Hobbs Strawberry Festival. What started with the suggestion that we visit a u-pick strawberry farm turned into a whole day event and a lot of deliciousness.
The only nearby u-pick strawberry farm which was open for the season was a place called Foster Farm's Strawberries. It turned out to be a great place to go! The berries were very reasonably priced (less than half of what they were going for at the Eau Claire Farmer's Market, which is a much more reasonably priced market than Bloomington's), and they let all the kids pick a quart for free!
Eddy and I picked our strawberries together.
Aww... cousin love!
Annie and I cheer about the two heaping flats of strawberries we bought. They didn't look like too many, until we brought them home and started processing them. In the end, we made 44 cups of jam (mostly from Collin's and my berries) and came home with 9 quarts of frozen berries. Such abundance! Later we also enjoyed strawberry angelfood cake and strawberry rhubarb crisp, courtesy of my sister-in-law Lindsey and her amazing culinary skills.
Annie looked really cute, sleeping on the drive home from the strawberry field.
We didn't take any pictures during the huge strawberry processing, but here's all the jam we made. We ended up cooking three batches of regular strawberry jam, one low-sugar batch, one low-sugar sweetened with honey, and a double batch of jam sweetened only with white grape juice. It all tasted good. Cathy (my dear M.I.L.) used to do a ton of canning every summer with the kids, so she still has a basement full of jars and equipment which made our huge project much easier. She even let us bring home one of her huge canning pots, so we won't have to borrow one this summer!
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