Strawberries should be a luxury food. A couple of months of indulgence a year, sweetened by a whole year of waiting. There’s this thing with seasonal luxury foods, that they start out expensive and the price encourages every kind of scammy hereticism, pushing them to grow until you get something that is cheap and very very nasty.
Back in June, I posted a picture of my new very beautiful Yule gift of this fruit bowl, filled with mid-winter fruit. Now it is strawberries and pawpaws in my part of the world. They make my very favourite breakfast smoothie. (Maybe I lie there. I have many favourites).
We don’t often have dessert for dinner, but I quite like dessert for breakfast. Real egg custard is sooooo easy, I really don’t get custard powder. Eggs are also a superfood, high in protein, B12 and choline, which is brain food.
Each morning early I’ve been picking strawberries, half for the chooks, slugs and all, and half for me. Luckily half is as many as we can eat, but it does seem very decadent for the chooks to be getting a punnet of strawberries a day! I’m thinking I should put out some beer-traps.
If you’ve been following The Breakfast Challenge then you’ll know I’m a bit ambivalent about porridge. I’m trying to like it. Oats for breakfast are hugely healthy – low GI, cholesterol busting, lots of B vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals – but regular old porridge is a bit bland for my tastes, unless it’s loaded up with brown sugar and cream, which sort of defeats the purpose.
The best way to eat mulberries is to be ten years old and sitting up in the fork of the tree, near naked to save clothes from stains, maybe with some other kids to chat with or maybe just with your thoughts, selecting the fattest purple berries to go directly from tree to mouth. Failing that though, paw paw, strawberry, mulberry and citrus fruit salad is one of those made-in-heaven…
I’m planting carrots, parsnips, spring onions, and beetroot, all by my standard method. The floods really knocked all my root crops around so I’m keen to get a new round in. However my main job this week is to refresh the strawberry patch.