The fun and freshness of seasonal eating

We had old friends over for dinner the other night – a real treat for us, as our hectic farming schedule is not conducive to sneaking in regular visits!

Our happy-to-be-city-people friends get as much of a kick out of our “farmy weirdness” as we do from how out of touch they are with where their food comes from, or how it’s produced. Listening to the animated Q & A these intelligent, supposedly functional adults engaged in with our young farm-raised children was priceless!

Case in point – the wife asked the children what were their favorite foods – our five year old longingly sighed, “Strawberries” as her answer. When pressed for why she answered so sadly, Molly gave a “how can you not know this?” look and replied, “Because it’s hard to wait for spring”. Then my friend said, “Oh if I had known they were your favorite we would have picked them up for dessert!” Complete and utter silence, along with looks on the four older children’s faces ranging from disbelief and shock to pity and disgust.

Poor dear, she just didn’t know eating fruit out of season verges on blasphemy. They told her to visit in May so she can taste a “real” strawberry – and they told her they’d rather wait for the real deal :-)

No matter how many strawberries we try raise, we always seem to just eat them as they come on, and I never have as many as I’d like for jam, desserts, canning, heaven forbid Saving… so they got a big kick out of showing off our last two jars of strawberries, that we’d saved up for a birthday!

If you have the chance to put up something, whether fruit, vegetable, herb, or protein, at its peak of freshness, there’s just nothing so refreshing come a dreary winter day as opening up a jar of dried herbs as green as the day you stocked them away, or some tomato sauce from the freezer, or a jar of pumpkin, berries, stock, what have you… I have been thrilled to no end lately that Grumpy Goat has been bringing extra herbs for sale at pickup so I can keep the dehydrator full, and enjoy using them all winter long!

Now if we could just raise enough berries to have enough to actually do something with other than just eat them… ????