Strawberry Picking in Portsmouth, RI

A perfect strawberry-picking day, with rain the day before to cool everything off and lots of dry, fresh straw in the rows. The picking season is just starting so each plant is bursting with ripe berries.

Picking berries for pleasure is fun. Picking them when you're getting paid by the pound and the fields are filled with pesticides would be another matter. Plot and Duck hadn't picked strawberries since Cat's Whiskers days. It's a wonderful thing to do -- the sun, the smell of the fruit and the occasional off-the-books-bite.

It took only an hour to harvest two large baskets of berries -- 15 quarts. Plot plunked down $28 bucks and then he, Ducknik and The Great BeezyWeezy headed off to Seekonk, Mass, to buy canning jars and all the paraphernalia.

That's $28 bucks for 15 quarts of berries. (They cost $3.50 per half pint basket at the Snowy Valley Farmer's Market and you don't get to pick them yourself and you have to listen to that lame banjo music and dodge the triple strollers.)

 The sad part was that after trying every big box store in Seekonk (Target, Odd Lots, etc...) to find canning jars and gear, the only place that carried them was Dreaded Walmart. The store was perfectly laid out and they had everything you could want, all on one convenient shelf. Plotnik hates it when the Republicans get it right.

The problem is that you need a whole lot less strawberries than you think to make jam. Probably one- third of the fifteen Q went into making thirteen pints of really tasty strawberry jam, which meant over ten quarts had to be dealt with. Jason came over later in the day with his ice cream freezer and amazing strawberry-buttermilk ice cream took a pint or so more. BZ gave away or froze the rest whole.

It turns out that to freeze strawberries the correct way all you have to do is spread them out one by one in the freezer, after drying them thoroughly (so ice crystals will not collect on their surface), then put them into a zip-loc freezer bag to use later for smoothies or even more ice cream or jam.

And let it be reported here that The Greats Plotnik and Ducknik, whose children still bemoan the fact that they had to grow up eating 'healthy food,' yesterday, Sunday, June 3, 2012, ate burgers, fries, pizza, jam and ice cream, topped off by beer.

In Providence, this is known as 'the bachelor life style.'