Summer of Love: Strawberries.
When tasting spring’s strawberries, you can have no sampling shame. My practice is to go around to each farmer at the Saturday Alemany Farmers Market, ask for a taste and if I don’t deem the strawberry worthy, I move on. Sometimes it’s hard—especially when you make eye contact with one of the nice people selling you the fruit of their labor—but life is too short for bland strawberries. But I’m rarely disappointed by the strawberries at Medina farm’s stand. Right now, they’ve got their Red Hearts and White Diamonds for sale. The Red Hearts this week were both sweet, and just as importantly, tart enough for a little pucker (too many strawberries these days are missing the latter). Not to mention, they’re only $8 for half a flat. I keep thinking I’m going to make something with them. Whip up some cream with a spoonful of mascarpone—some kind of layered thing in a glass, 50s-style. But honestly, they’re good enough to stand alone. And so I just keeping eating them one by one while standing at the kitchen counter.
