From Scratch's Top 10 Recipes from 2014!

As we kick off 2015, there's a lot great things on the horizon!  But today, I'm looking back, to the top 10 most popular posts from last year.  And let me tell you, you readers have got good taste!  There's a year's worth of tastiness summed up in these 10 posts!

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.

Sham-Shamrock Shake

I used to live for that time of year when a certain fast food green shake would make it's appearance.  My birthday happens to be exactly a week after St. Patrick's Day, and spring is my favorite time of year, so getting one of those sweet treats became a tradition of celebrating the season.  A sign of good things to come.

But then, once we started eating more "real food", those shakes just didn't taste as good.  I know a lot of people say that about things and mean it as some kind of metaphor, like their guilt over having it didn't outweigh the enjoyment of drinking it, but I mean it the straightforward way: the shake just tastes artificial to me.  I can taste the food coloring in particular, and it just doesn't match up to the idealized version of it that I have in my head.

So then, last year, I stumbled across this recipe for Drunk Shamrock Shake.  I'm a convert, full on in my new-found affection for this reincarnation of that minty green shake.  If the original shake left me feeling empty and cheated, this one fills my soul and makes me feel...well...happy.