It’s A Splendid Day for Blending

It’s a splendid day for blending with spring kick-off time for berry picking. The strawberries are coming in full force and if your willpower is strong enough to resist eating them straight from the plant, (unlike our Border Collie Cokie) berries in the blender are a perfect choice for a refreshing drink.

A quick tip recipe:

Here’s what you need:

A blender
A cup of ice
Four scoops of plain yogurt
Two cups of water
15 to 20 strawberries washed and de-stemmed
Sugar to taste
(NOTE: Here’s one you can try but even this spearmint lover isn’t quite sure yet)
Four to five sprigs of fresh spearmint leaves.
It adds a refreshing, settling flavor and could work well with spicy foods.

Blend it up, with or without spearmint and you have an easy, healthy drink for the patio.

And if you don’t have strawberries growing in your garden, U-pick it farms should be exploding with berries. Now’s the time for picking! And in the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.” Or dogs! 

Here’s Cokie eyeing the basket of berries for additional munching pleasure. Ben, our other Border collie would rather be off splashing in his pool.

To end today’s post of berries and picking, find time to do something in the garden. Here’s a thought – pick some fresh flowers. Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Freshen the Flowers, She Said’ from her book, ‘Why I Wake Early’ spells it out perfectly.

“So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain was tender,
And took out the tattered and cut each stem on a slant,
Trimmed the black and raggy leaves, and set them all –
Roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies,
And more whose names I don’t know, in bright new water –
Gave them

A bounce upward at the end to let them take
Their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs,
The little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,
Perhaps fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.”

I just love the fifteen minute analogy! Enjoy your Wednesday.

Above images taken by Ann Bilowz

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