Let's take a trip to the strawberry patch...

Have you ever bought strawberries at the grocery store? Sometimes they smell pretty good and they look pretty red. Fresh picked strawberries are nothing like those pretty good smelling, red looking strawberries.

Fresh picked strawberries are delicate little morsels. Red, plump, and juicy. They are so juicy. When you have one between your fingers, you can just tell that it's different. The weight of it feels different in your hand. And when you bite into it, it's surprisingly soft. If you've been eating supermarket strawberries, you've probably been experiencing quite a bit of crunch in your strawberries. They're usually firm, almost tough. Fresh picked strawberries practically melt in your mouth. You can smoosh it between the roof of your mouth and your tongue and it releases its sweet juices to run down your throat.

Mom and I started a tradition a couple of summers ago to pick strawberries at a local farm, take the loot home, and make enough jam to last us an eternity. Well, at least enough to last until the next summer. We usually end up with so many strawberries we end up freezing most of them to use later. We just use the recipe in the SureJell box, which uses about 4 cups of sugar per batch. That's a lot of sugar! We ran out of SureJell this time around, but we happened to have a package of a different brand of pectin with a different recipe for jam that used half the sugar. HALF! Well, we gave it a shot, and turns out we might have a new recipe for jam. The new recipe isn't as sweet and tastes more like strawberries. I'm a fan.

Rhubarb is often paired with strawberries, but in my almost 23 years I had not once tried it! Can you believe that? I can't. That's why we made strawberry-rhubarb pie. Like my best friend, Valerie, put it, strawberry-rhubarb pie is the perfect balance of sweet and sour. Considering I've never been a great baker, I'd say it came out pretty darn good!