More Strawberry Goodness

I am absolutely loving the Strawberry Vanilla Jam I made.  It's from Ball's Big Book of Canning and so easy... just a matter of adding a split vanilla bean while heating up the strawberries for traditional jam.

I also attempted a batch of Strawberry Lemonade Concentrate.  Sounds delightful, doesn't it?  And it would be, if it weren't for the fact that I had to juice 25 lemons in order to get the 4 cups of fresh lemon juice required.  Thankfully, I have a juicer attachment for my Kitchen Aid, but it still wasn't 'quick' and my wrist still hurt when all was said and done.

Another gadget that has been very helpful is this mushroom slicer that I won last year from www.dehydrate2store.

It saved me a lot of time slicing berries and filling up all 9 trays of the dehydrator.

I don't have a ton of freezer space available (we haven't made a dent in our 1/4 side of beef and we've got a 1/2 hog coming in a few months) so I plan to dehydrate a lot more this season.  But I did freeze a few quarts, because we love smoothies around here.  I also made a batch of strawberry ice cream.

For now, I am all caught up on the 22+lbs of berries I picked.  I'm taking a few days off, but then I'll go pick more.  I still have several jam recipes to try and then I definitely want to make more Strawberry-Vanilla!