More Strawberries!!!

Okay, so I'm a little obsessed with the strawberries.  These little darlings are the first edible strawberries from our strawberry row.  It's not a patch by any means.  It's definitely a row.  And most of the berries have been devoured by things unknown to me, save these two.  Those are Eli's fingers attempting to get in the way of my picture-taking. 
After me + strawberry jam making = failure, I decided to give it a go once more.  I found THE PERFECT strawberry jam recipe, or as the creator calls it, "Hot Damn This Is Good Jam".  It is also sans pectin.  It took me longer than 30 minutes of cooking time, but thankfully while I had to leave the house, my mom took over and jammed for me.  This jam is thick and yummy.  In my previous disaster of a batch, the chunks of berries all floated to the top and the jelly sat at the bottom.  It's like fruit on the bottom yogurt, only different and reverse.  Okay, bad comparison, but you get the picture.  I followed the recipe exactly and got wonderful results.  Thank you, Christina at intimateweddings.com!
I didn't use all the berries for jam.  That would be a whole lot of strawberry jam...more than I'd need.  So, I sought after some recipes.  We got some rhubarb from our local csa.  Perfect!  Strawberry rhubarb...something...
I found an easy and super yummy recipe for strawberry rhubarb crisp over at Food & Wine. Holy cannoli it was so good.  My husband, who is not a sweets person, at more than one serving.  And took some to work.  And took more the day after. 

I still had more strawberries.  18lbs is a LOT of strawberries.  I hulled and quartered some and threw it on our salads...for four days.  I made a strawberry-blueberry-chard-kale-coconut water-lime smoothie.  That was super duper yummy.  My anti-greens child gulped two cups of the smoothie and had no idea there were greens, let alone kale and chard, in it.  Score!  And lastly, I made daiquiri's.  Virgin.  I've got little kids who want to, and usually succeed in doing so, take sips from your glass.  I used the recipe from Jennifer over at Mama's Minutia.  Easy peasy...
2 cups hulled strawberries
1 cup simple syrup
2 tbs freshly squeezed lemon juice
6 tbs freshly squeezed lime juice

Combine the ingredients in a blender.  Add ice.  We used 2 ice trays of ice. 
My directions vary from Jennifer's.  I'm a throw-it-all-in kinda girl.  It usually backfires, but this time it was delicious. 

In order to avoid a brain freeze, we all used spoons.  It was so hot that it melted before we were done, then it was tepid enough to chug. 
By the way, I think I'm making up for missing strawberry season last year. I might just go back again and pick more.