FfNl: Strawberries

You've got to love strawberry season. On Sunday, I gathered a posse of friends and we headed to a local u-pick organic strawberry farm. I personally picked about six pounds of beautiful, red, juicy berries. Which only took about 30 minutes. There was so much fruit! If only I had a bigger home or more people to feed.

Since then I've been trying to figure out what to do with all of them. I froze some, but my freezer is a bit small, so I don't know that I'll be able to freeze too many more. I ate some, of course. I'm thinking of making some jam, but I just don't eat that much jam and I still have quite a few jars of jam left over from last years jam making adventures. There may be a pie or some strawberry bread in my future, but I've still got a big heap of berries.

I took a look in my handy Preserved cookbook and decided to try my hand at making dried strawberries. It is simple enough: slice up your berries and put in a food dehydrator, low oven or drying box for 12 hours. Of the three, I've only the oven, so last night I gave it a shot. They are great! Chewy, sweet and delicious. I think they'll be incredibly tasty on cereal or in the granola I'm always planning on making. Plus, they take up a lot less space once all that water is gone!

Small packages

As most of the people who read this blog (I think maybe there are two of you) know, my birthday was a while ago. I did pretty well on the present front (yay, waffle iron!) and I had a bunch of friends buy me many beers and tasty Indian food. Birthdays don't get a whole lot better. However, in what has become a bit of a tradition, my sister likes to send me a package a few weeks late with all sorts of presents. I love belated birthday presents. In fact, in many ways presents and packages that come on non-birthdays are infinitely more special. Who doesn't like the surprise of an unexpected package? Add to that, there is the fact that Molly, my sister, is a expert at putting together great packages with a good mix of small and big things.

I got this cool octopus shirt (sorry for the crappy picture):

These tasty, tasty cookies:

Also she sent me some bike shoes to borrow for a while, which I plan to use once I manage to learn to shift the gears on a road bike without swerving into traffic. I hope that happens by the end of summer.

Additionally, Molly included a note that said,"As usual, the ones in the smallest packages are the most special". To that point, the smallest packages I found contained these (which were stuffed inside the bike shoes):

Now, don't get me wrong, I like nail polish. In fact, less than 24 hours after receiving my package the Jet-set in Lightening and the OPI in Bogata Blackberry graced my fingers and toes, respectively. However, I'm not sure I'd ever classify nail polish as the "most special". I was just a little confused. But then I found them. The two little bits all wrapped up in tissue paper(I'm really glad I didn't mistake them for packing material) that contained a gorgeous pair of earrings and a necklace.

I am entranced by them. They are called "air", and quite appropriately, too. The beads made of the most delicate blown glass, and they just seem to float. They were made by marieflyfly. You can shop her etsy shop here.

Thanks Mo! I loved it all, from the nail polish on up. You can send me a package anytime you like.

Alien invasion

One of the more memorable events of my most recent trip home was witnessing an alien invasion.

Okay, maybe what I actually witnessed dragonfly hatch day 2010, but I swear they look like aliens. It was fascinating to watch them undergo metamorphosis. I may have possibly taken approximately 60,000 pictures of the event just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I only did it for you. I'm not obsessed. I swear.

The dragonfly larvae crawl out of the water and perch themselves on a surface. In my experience it is most often a vertical surface, for example the nice shingled siding of our boathouse. I'm not sure what signals them to make the water-to-land transition, but for whatever reason, this year they chose Memorial Day for the mass exodus from their larval prisons.

So they bust out of their skin and begin hanging upside-down, doing periodic hanging crunch-type things as their bodies move further out of the larvae. Then they do some serious acrobatics: They flip right-side-up and grab onto their old larval head and pull their body the rest of the way out.

If all that weren't crazy-impressive enough, they then pump fluid out of their fat bodies into their shriveled up wings, slowly inflating them.

They just keep pumping up their wings, and once they're done with that they hang around to let their wings dry up before they go flying off.

Isn't he (or she...I'm no expert in determining the sex of dragonflies) pretty? Isn't it crazy how those dinky little wings turn into those big glossy numbers?

*Disclaimer: I have no actual scientific knowledge of any of this stuff so don't go quoting me for your next science project.