simple food :: berry good recipe round-up

Yesterday was our first day of summer vacation and the weather was per.fect – a slight chill in the morning, a gentle breeze all day long, enough sunshine to warm things up…but not too hot! Days like this don’t come along often down here in Georgia, so when they do we try to stay outside all day long! We started our day by heading out to our local strawberry patch. Each of my kids armed with a bucket, we picked a little over 12 pounds of strawberries. Yep. 12 pounds. For starters, we ate probably a good 3 pounds of plain strawberries. There are few things as delicious as a piece of fresh-picked fruit that is still a little warmed by the sun. After we’d had our fill, I started cutting and dicing and slicing and freezing. There seem to be tons of strawberry-related recipes out there but a lot of them seemed really time-intensive and somewhat difficult. So I set out to find a few simple strawberry recipes:

• Smoothies – We love smoothies and strawberry-kiwi is one of our absolute favorites! If you flash freeze the strawberries, you won’t even need ice to make it thick! For mine I blend together a handful of spinach, about 2 kiwi, two handfuls of frozen strawberries, and a big dollop of honey.
• Strawberry Spinach Salad – This is a go-to lunch for me in the summer. Full of taste and easy to make.
• Strawberry-Turkey-Brie Sandwich {shown: top right} – I have to admit that I didn’t have really high expectations for this recipe, but I was wrong! It is incredibly delicious with a nice combination of sweet and savory! (My older two kids each ate 2 whole sandwiches)!
• Strawberry-Nutella RollUps {shown: bottom left} – I didn’t shape mine the way that it says to in the recipe but they were quite yummy anyway! My mom voted these as her favorite of all the ones we tried.
• Cinnamon-Strawberry Nachos {shown: bottom right} – The recipe calls for baked cinnamon chips but we used store-bought cinnamon bagel chips. I made an entire tray and it was gone in less than 10 minutes.
• Strawberry-center Cupcakes – Because I don’t have the patience to be a good baker, I like to pretend that the messier the food, the better the taste. This recipe gave good instructions on how to make pretty cupcakes and I completely messed it up anyway. My cupcakes fell to pieces in my hand but melted in my mouth. So even though I don’t have a picture of it, I can assure you that it was delish!
• Strawberry Jam – This is the only jam recipe I’ve ever used and not messed up. I promise this one is easy. Just give it a try.

What other simple strawberry recipes do you have? I still have about 4 pounds of berries in my fridge! I’ll probably freeze about half of what I have left, but I’d like to try something new with the other half.