Strawberries 3 Ways - (Sep - Nov 2009)

        Strawberries are an absolutely gorgeous fruit, especially when you score an awesome punnet. Plump, juicey, sweet. Last year was definately the year fof strawberries, they were cheap and they were good. We (Ryan and I) both found that this year has been quite a hit and miss. The cheaper strawberries - you know the 2 for $5, 3 for $10 kinda deal, they've been on the small side and at times quite tart. I know I definately didn't have that problem last year and have found myself paying a little more for the "full priced" punnets but havn't been all that impressed with them either all season. But we still love them, especially the mutated ginormous ones!

        Strawberry season was so good last year I kept coming home with 2-3 punnets every time. We thought about what we could do with them (apart from eating them as they are) and Ryan and I did one "dish" each. I wanted to poach my strawberries. All I did was simply pour a cup of white wine into a saucepan and stired in about quarter to half a cup of sugar and then popped the strawberries in and poached them until they were just soft. This was actually inspired by our dessert of poaches strawberries when we were dining at La Grande Bouffe a few weeks early.

        Ryan wanted to try balsamic macerated strawberries. He sprinkled some icing sugar over the strawberries and drizzled them with balsamic vinegar and tossed them to mix it through and then gently heated them in a pan until the sugar and vinger caramelised.

        I had bought a tub of vanilla bean gelato which we ate with our strawberries, there's a crushed up home made amaretti biscuit under the ice cream there, this plating is also Ryan's handywork, I suck at plating. It was such a lovely dessert to eat, soft sweet strawberries, cruncy biscuits and creamy gelato. Mmm!

        This was Ryan's "dish". He did a "sandwich" of amaretti biscuit with vanilla bean gelato and spooned the balsamic strawberries around. I've always been a bit weary about balsamic vinger in desserts but this was so good!

        I had so many strawberries that I had enough to do another strawberry dessert the next day. I decided to make meringue nests (if you squint you can see it) and served them with poached strawberries and vanilla bean ice cream again but with the addition of a sabayon (to use up the leftover egg yolks of course).

        These were not made from the same strawberries as above - you can just see they are better quality and are much bigger =D I just love a good chocolate dipped strawberry! Simple pleasures in life.

        Last year for the long trip to a camp over the October long weekend I made some chocolate coated strawberries to eat and one of my friends jokingly said I should make "strawberry coated chocolate". After much joking around we got serious and were talking about how I should get some strawberries and "inject" them with chocolate. So one weekend I did. I pierced some strawberries and hollowed out the middle (using a long narrow piping tip and poking it into the middle of the strawberry) and then using that same tip to pipe in some chocolate ganache. It was a good concept but I need to perfect the technique, I've got some ideas but just havn't gotten around to doing this again. One day I shall...

        Okay so that was more than 3 ways to cook/play with strawberries, I've also had strawberries on raisen toast and made strawberries and cream ice cream. I will save those to be featured in a future blog post Oh and not to mention my Strawbery Souffle =).