Tag Archives: strawberries

strawberry fields

Strawberry All The Things

 

A farm near us opened last week for strawberry-picking season.  Josh and I, eager to get our berry on, showed up on Wednesday.  “We’ll pick a few pounds,” I thought, “No big deal.”  I mean, we were only there for an hour, the two of us.  No big deal…

Yeah.  It’s all fun and games until you get up the scale at the end of your trip and you have to shell out money for the 25 pounds of strawberries you just plucked from the earth.

So we took this story to its natural conclusion and made jam.  Lots of jam.  25 half pints of jam…plus a couple quarts of strawberry ice cream…and still have half a flat of strawberries left. Continue reading

Strawberry Tiramisu

I like tiramisu.  I like the idea of it even more.  I don’t make the traditional version at home because I don’t keep coffee in the apartment (for anything, ever) and Josh doesn’t like the taste of coffee anyway.  Also, it’s a bit indulgent and we wouldn’t want to eat a whole tiramisu ourselves.  One summer I really wanted a lighter, fresher version of the dessert though and luckily, a few weeks later Giada de Laurentiis did a raspberry version on her show and then I found a recipe for a low-cal tiramisu in Everyday Food. .  I thought, I could do something with this, with a bit of inspiration from FoodTV.  I picked strawberries because they are one of my top three favorite foods (the other two being chocolate and barbecue), not to mention healthy and delicious.

And thus, the recipe below:

Ingredients
1 8oz package lite cream cheese
8oz heavy whipping cream
1/3 c. sugar
1 small jar sugar-free strawberry jam
1 c. fresh strawberries, cut
few pinches of powdered sugar
1 small baked angel food cake

Mix the cream cheese, whipping cream, and sugar until soft peaks form.  Layer a little on the bottom of a large dessert pan or bowl.  Cut the angel food cake into flat slices and layer on top of cream.  Spread more cream on top of the cake slices, and then spread strawberry jam.  Layer with more cake, and then cream and jam until almost all the cream is gone.  Top the final layer with the cream mix, then top with fresh strawberries.  Sprinkle with powdered sugar.  Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour and a half.