Strawberry Picking at its Best

There is nothing more rewarding and refreshing that getting your hands dirty and carefully selecting fresh fruit in-season, and when that fruit is a luscious, sweet, delicious, red berry packed with nutrition, it has to be strawberry picking time!

Whether they are piled high a top a soft sponge cake with fresh whipped cream or adding the perfect burst of flavor to a hearty and healthy bowl of oatmeal, strawberries pack a flavorful punch.

Last weekend I decided to get my hands on some local, organic strawberries. I must say that picking strawberries is quite the task. I tend to eat more then I put in my basket, and after awhile, bending over starts to ache but the copious amounts of berries that you are able to bring home (pretty inexpensively!) are well worth every drip of sweat and back ache.

Most people go for the bigger berries because that is what they are used to seeing in grocery stores, but the smaller berries are often the most flavorful and worth the extra effort to gently tug from the adjoining stems.

As soon as I got home I kept some berries fresh, which I used for snacking and in yogurt parfaits, oatmeal or cereal, and then froze the rest. The trick to freezing berries is to put them in Ziploc freezer bags and make sure they lay flat so that once they freeze they aren’t all stuck together. When thawed, frozen berries don’t hold their shapes well so are best used in pancakes, waffles, pies, cookies, cakes etc. I made some delicious strawberry bran muffins with a hint of lemon zest, a wonderful compliment of flavors. These muffins can also be made with blueberries, raspberries or blackberries, which are also in-season.

So be creative and get your hands on some freshly picked berries!

Strawberry Bran Muffins

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups wheat bran

3/4 teaspoon fine grain sea salt

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

2 tablespoons raw cane sugar OR brown sugar

2 cups full fat yogurt

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 cup honey

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 cup of fresh or frozen strawberries

2 teaspoons of lemon zest

Preheat oven to 425F degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, wheat bran, salt, baking soda and sugar.

Beat together the yogurt, egg, honey and butter in a second, larger bowl. Add the dry ingredients and fold in until everything comes together. Fold in strawberries and lemon zest.

Either grease or line a muffin pan. Fill each 3/4 full. Bake 15-20 minutes, until muffins are golden on top and cooked through. You can also make these into mini muffins, just bake about 5 minutes less.

Makes about two dozen tiny muffins or one dozen larger ones.