It took quite a bit of time, but we've finally done something with all of our strawberries. Monday night, I prepared 5 cups of strawberry freezer jam, roughly following the linked recipe-- I just bought plastic ball jars and ball freezer jam fruit pectin, and the recipe was on the pectin. Here's a picture of those:I also washed and sliced about 2 quarts of stawberries, then put enough into the 1 quart reynold's handi-vac bags so I could lay them flat in the freezer-- this filled 5 bags. Once they were frozen pretty hard, I vacuumed away the evil air.
I also prepared a strawberry cool whip dessert, following this recipe from their website, I'll just post an image from the .pdf (click it if you want to read it):
That was all I could accomplish Monday night before Alli came home. I let that freeze overnight, and we had it for dessert Tuesday after I coated it with cool whip and fresh strawberries. Here's what some of our partially eaten dessert looked like:
Then Tuesday night after dinner I took care of the rest of the strawberries. I prepared 1 vacuum pack quart bag, packed full, of unwashed whole strawberries, then sliced about a quart and stuck it in a tupperware container ready to eat, and sliced and packed fairly full another vacuum bag and tried to suck some air out of it, but put it in the fridge. So I'm hopeful we can take care of the sliced ones in the fridge for some strawberry ice cream (or yogurt) soon, and some strawberry banana pancakes, if I can ever get up early enough to make them, more topping for our dessert, and of course, general snacking.
Another picture for your enjoyment:
I do want to take a moment to say these strawberries were on their way bad pretty fast. When I picked them, there were just a few that I thought "well, there's a little spot that's maybe a tad soft", but I'll just cut that off soon. I think by the next day those few strawberries were mush. Each day I tried to set aside the strawberries that looked hardiest and would make it until tomorrow, and by the next day there seemed to always be a few with soft spots soon to be mold. I also picked a few berries that I thought were underripe, but after a day or two time I didn't think any berries would pass for underripe.
Point being, it's no small wonder that strawberries are available year-round in your local grocery store. I'm sure they've selected for the hardy ones, and they probably pick them green and all, but it's still pretty amazing.
Even so, we only lost maybe a pint out of 10 quarts, so not too awful, just something to consider.