Strawberry Bonanza Part 1 - Quick and Easy Strawberry Malts

This post is going to be short and sweet.  You see, the kids and I went strawberry picking today, and I may have been a little greedy...we picked 8 buckets of berries, roughly 54 pounds in all, in just under an hour out in the fields.

Turns out, 54 pounds is a LOT of strawberries.  So I've spent most of the day in the kitchen, trying to get them taken care of, because fresh strawberries don't keep well for very long.  So I'm pretty beat.

But after we got home from picking, I made a special treat for the kids.  All right, it was as much for me as it was for them.  Strawberry malts.

Making Mozz

I tend to have big ideas and then slack on some of the follow through.  I also tend to be a little spoiled by my husband, and if I mention (or, say, e-mail a link to) something I'm interested in, he will often buy that thing (within reason) for me for the next appropriate holiday.  Enter the cheese making kits.

Last year, right around Mother's Day, I saw that Williams-Sonoma had DIY cheese kits available.  And my inner food geek went a little nuts.  I started dropping hints, like, "Wow, with all the tomatoes and basil that we have in the garden, wouldn't it be nice to have fresh, homemade mozzarella to make caprese?", and "Grilled pizza is the bomb.  The only way it could be better is if we had some fresh, homemade mozzarella to top it with!".  You know, subtle.