Strawberries - Frozen, Fermented, Dehydrated, and Enjoyed

I am taking a little break from cleaning strawberries to write about our new experience of picking strawberries.  Since my husband works 10 hour days Monday through Friday and 5 hours every Saturday morning, when I want to do something with the kids it is pretty much all on me.  Me, myself, and I plus four kids.  Taking the kids to pick berries has always been something on my to do list but just the thought of it made me so nervous.  Finally, this year with everyone being a little bit older I thought I would give it a try.  After all, we did manage to survive picking our own apples last fall and they have become great egg hunters when we go to our friends farm to get eggs every few weeks.

Not only did we survive but we managed to have a fantastic time!  Everyone had a great time picking, even Peylyn and Taj.  I told them that we had to try really hard to not step on any plants and that we were looking for the really red berries.  As I started cleaning the berries I was impressed at how well they did.

So now what do we do with all of these strawberries????  I froze a bunch because we LOVE strawberry smoothies, as soon as I type this up I am going to sit down and slice a bunch to dehydrate.  I thought that would be a yummy change to our granola and oatmeal and also just to have on hand for a quick little snack.  After cleaning a bunch to put in the fridge and enjoy just as they are I have a small batch left that I want to ferment.  I have been searching the internet but I can't find what I am looking for, I may just have to ferment these as I have fermented fruit in the past and see how it goes.  At $1.25 per pound I think I can spare a few for an experiment that could turn out to be really delicious.  I did dump about a pint into my very first batch of mead.  I am super excited about this!  I keep looking at the recipe in Wild Fermentation thinking that I need to make this...honey and water, nothing could be more simple!!!  I will let you know how the mead turns out.