Strawberry Fields Forever

These are the salad days of summer here in the Northwest. Not quite warm enough for most items in the vegetable garden, lettuce continues to be main harvest, at least for the moment. As they say, when life gives you butter leaf and iceberg, you make salad.

The cold and soggy spring, served up by the current La Niña, produced one of the chilliest months of May on record, pushing strawberry harvest into mid-June. The early varieties are late and the later varieties are on time, so strawberry season has been compacted into a short period. Just-picked, sun-ripened strawberries, loaded with natural sugars that rapidly convert to starch once the picked. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste.

I have not always been a fan of strawberries. As a child, strawberries and shortcake for dessert meant I was having shortcake. I did not appreciate the complex volatile flavors. Turning down strawberries always produced unusual looks in others; who turns down that scarlet exterior, filled with the flavor of summer sunshine?

It was during my first job in the food industry as a product developer that I was introduced to strawberries from the Pacific Northwest. Picked, sliced and packed at the peak of their flavor, they were different from the berries available in Southern California. The flavors were deeper, the core wasn't white, the juice deep red. The names of the varieties were just as intoxicating: Shuksan, Totem, Rainier. And they were packed with sugar, which is always an added bonus.

High tea would be incomplete without strawberry preserves along side scones and clotted cream, traditional lemonade is better with with the addition of fresh sweet strawberries, fruit salad is naked without the deep red color of sliced strawberries. Today strawberries are a welcome addition to my plate. I still need them to be sweet, as for me it embraces and enhances the flavor.

Too soon we will pack summer away for another year, carefully storing it in boxes and photographs, dreaming of when we can unpack it again. For now, we relish in it being here, living for and in the moment, taking in all that summer can supply, placing some strawberries into the freezer to open when need to feel the warmth of summer on our back.