Hello! Happy middle of June! It has been a tough couple of months but I am so happy to finally be in summer. I am based out of Minnesota and we are in the full swing of summer. High temps, humidity, pools, mosquitoes, and strawberries! Yes, our first patch opened up on Sunday June 15th. Of course the boys and I had to head to it to pick our own strawberries.
We headed to a new location this year, The Strawberry Basket, located in Monticello. This was a bit of a drive from our home and well worth it. They open at 7:00am, we arrived about 8:30am on Monday morning. The staff was great, the experience fun!. Upon exiting the car, we were greeted with a smiling face and walked right the the patch. There were probably about 15-18 people already in the fields. We were taken to a section to where we got to pick by ourselves the entire time we were there. We picked for about an hour and ended up with just over 8 pounds of strawberries. The boys would have kept going but in all honesty we probably didn’t need even as many as we picked. They were excited to sample while picking and of course continuing sampling on our drive home!
Once home we made a fresh strawberry pie. I’m pretty certian this is the very first pie I have ever made. It was simple and everyone enjoyed it for desert! Because this was my first pie, and the boys were helping, I to the easy way out and used a Betty Crocker Pie Crust mix. One box has enough mix to make 2 crusts, we had to make both for our pie that only needed one. Oops! We had a little miss measuring of water on our first attempt. A good lesson learned for the boys! The crust was easy to roll out, transfer to the pie pan was effortless, and baking went smooth. Simple! Just the way I like it!
While the pie crust was cooking, we cut the strawberries used in the pie. Once the pie crust was cool, we made the strawberry sauce. We layered in the cut strawberries first, and then poured the strawberry sauce on top of them. This made the top of the pie look a bit messy. In the future I would put some of the strawberry sauce in the curst first, then layer strawberries and maybe top it off with a a bit more of the sauce. There are lots of ways to make it look prettier than mine! Once everything was put together we put it in the fridge to chill. After dinner, we cut it and served it with whipped cream! It was a hit, even my husband liked it and he doesn’t eat deserts much anymore. Below you’ll find the recipe we used. This a a great living chirpy day, we had so much fun picking our own fruit and spending time together in the kitchen. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
