Strawberry Cutting and Freezing

We were blessed with the opportunity to purchase a large quantity of strawberries for 50 cents per pound. Seeing as I didn't get around to preparing the beds for my strawberries and we didn't grow any this year, I was super excited to be able to stock up on strawberries!! We love berries, the kids eat them almost every morning with their oatmeal, and we also love afternoon smoothies! I called my sister and told her about the strawberries and so we loaded up all the kids and drove out to buy some flats of strawberries! We ended up getting 160 pounds and so we went back to her house and the cleaning began!! We put the kids to work and they were fantastic! Kurtis, my brother in law, (after he got over the initial shock of Evie buying so many strawberries) pitched in to help and made some fantastic strawberry adult beverages! My mom and dad stopped by to help out for a while too! And of course Bryan hurried over to help out with the strawberry mania!

We Started by filling up the sinks and cleaning all the strawberries. Madison (my 7 year old niece) was extremely helpful!! She probably did more work than most of the adults! She kept the sinks full by getting all the strawberries out of the flats when the we needed more cleaned and she would clean them and drain them and then keep our little piles stacked up and ready to be cut! She also helped collecting all the stems we cut off and filling the freezer baggies with strawberries! She was amazing :)

All the other kids wanted to help too! Laken (my 5 year old niece) and Henry were helping with the assembly line of bringing new strawberries to clean. Mason (my 1 year old nephew) even pitched in a few times with carrying strawberries! Mostly Laken, Henry, Addie and Mason offered their services with EATING the strawberries...I think we have a few that we could spare though :)

The crew at work! You can see the big pile of bagged strawberries on the counter...and that was barely one third of what we ended up with!

We really didn't have any special method behind our madness, we just cleaned and cut the strawberries and then put them in freezer bags. We filled the flats back up with the bags and stacked them. We ended up with a little over 60lbs lbs of cleaned strawberries each (Evie and I). We ate ALOT of strawberries, kept about 10 lbs of whole, uncut strawberries, mom and dad took a few bags and who knows how many the kids hid around the house to be able to eat later...lol, I'm just kidding Evie, I sure hope not!! And the stems all went to our compost!!

I didn't get a picture of the entire pile of bagged strawberries...I know I know I'm bummed too! And by the time I realized I hadn't taken that picture, Evie had already put all her strawberries in her freezer and ours were loaded up in our car ready to go home...and the last thing we wanted to do after 3 hours of strawberry cleaning was to unload everything just for a picture!

I do have to share this picture though!! Bryan and I were trying to take a serious, nice picture and when I was looking back over the pictures I see Evie in the background! The funniest part is that I didn't even see her at first until Bryan said "Ah, look at the Troll in the background" and Kurtis said "wow one eyed cyclopes!"...I relooked at the picture and then we all laughed hysterically for quite a while! Thank you Evie for a hilarious picture!! I guess thats what happens when you get 2 sisters together for any length of time...we just get giddy and silly and funny things happen!