Strawberry season is back baby and it’s the best time of the year! (Next to tomato season, of course)
To celebrate, I’ve got some notes and a recipe:
- Strawberries are the first fruit to ripen each spring. They signal the beginning of all things sunny, warm, and blooming – refreshing meals, tart desserts, & iced drinks. Peace out to the heavy, starchy produce coating our ribs for winter hibernation.
- The nostalgia! Biting off the red fruit, making sure to avoid the green stuff, the juiciness staining our clothes as a kid. The chocolate covered lovers gift as we got older. The songs and flavored candies and characters based on strawberries and strawberries & cremes… cheesecakes, shortcakes, whipped cream… can you really tell me this isn’t giving you all the feels?
Random strawberry facts:
- They consistently rank high on the dirty dozen list (the top produce with the highest levels of pesticide residue) – consider going organic with your strawbs!
- They are very high in vitamin C
- Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside
Strawberry Earl Grey Milk tea
A warm strawberry drink for the days Atlanta is confused about how to weather for the season.*
1 earl gray tea bag
2 cups milk of choice
4+ strawberries (the more the merrier, imo)
Sweetener (for reference, I use 2-3 heaping pinches of sugar)
- Wash, de-stem, and mash up your strawberries. I like having small chunks in there but overall you’ll want it pretty smooth.
- Heat up your milk & steep your tea in the milk. Steep, steep, steep.
- In a separate pan, add your strawberries and sweetener to your liking, then heat on low – let it bubble and cook just until some of the water has evaporated and everything is warm and mixed. FYI it’ll get sticky so scrape the sides down often.
- Remove your teabag from the milk, put the strawberries & milk tea in a mug, stir and sip!
I’ve tried this chilled and it holds up! Just steep a tea concentrate – 1 teabag + a 1/4 c of boiling water, and skip the rest of the heating processes all together!
Or skip the tea and milk all together and spoon the warm strawberry sugar mixture over vanilla ice cream ~~
*I knock any recipe that hides a strawberry since they are jewels of the earth. This recipe brings out every bit of their flavor and completely elaborates just a few strawberries in the best way possible.
Words by Emma Weldon, a multidisciplinary designer in Atlanta, Georgia
Art by Daniela Cardona, an Architectural QA/QC Manager in Roswell GA
