Strawberries for Father's Day

We celebrated Father's Day with my dad on Saturday last weekend.  We loaded up for their house right away in the morning, dropped off the dog, picked up the grandparents and headed for a pick your own strawberries patch.  My dad chooses such fun family things to do!  Wow, was it ever fun!  I've never seen such a large strawberry farm.  They went on forever.  I think it would be so awesome to own something like that!  We were led to two rows to pick from and got right to work.  All five of us picked and picked!

It was the perfect day for picking.  It was probably about 70 and overcast with a decent breeze.  There were no bugs and there were plenty of delicious, red strawberries!  Some of us had to taste them right away.

I think we were only picking for 20 or 30 minutes because there were so many ready to go.  We filled two flats and Aria's two little buckets.  Never did I imagine it would be 23 pounds of strawberries!

After a fun ride on a golf cart back up to the pay area and checking out the play area, we headed back to grandma and papa's to prepare our strawberries.  First up was strawberry shortcake!  Mmmmmmmmmm was it delicious!  We missed national Strawberry Shortcake Day by a day, but enjoyed it none the less.

Then we took a break from the strawberries for awhile to take a jeep ride on the trails around the subdivision...

And go swimming in the hot tub! 

Finally it was time to make some jam!  We made two batches because that was all the sure jell the store had and it didn't seem like there was even a dent in the strawberries.

Here is the run down of our use of 23 pounds of strawberries:

2 heaping batches of strawberry shortcake
5 batches of jam
1 strawberry pie
1-2 pounds for a fruit salad
several to just eat

Phew!  23 pounds of strawberries is a lot, but they were so good.  I mean it isn't even fair to compare them to the store bought strawberries.  So delicious!

Oh, and Aria made some awesome golf cupcakes to take for Papa for Father's Day.  She dumped in the ingredients, ran the mixer by herself, lined the cupcake pan, and spooned in the batter.  It was the first time we had ever made chocolate cake from scratch.  We also made the frosting.  Then we decorated with green sprinkles, blue sprinkles, crushed graham crackers, and little white sugar balls to make a golf course.  Here is the finished product!

It was quite the fun day!