Strawberries, two ways

London has been caught up in the heat wave that a lot of midwesterners and the east coast have been experiencing this week. I'm starting to get a sense of why people in London complain about the heat in the summer. Not that Bloomington wasn't this hot. A 90 degree day was pretty normal there, and probably lower than the average John was accustomed to in Tennessee. But London deals with it differently (re: poorly). A lot of buildings don't have air conditioning, or don't turn it on very high. Our apartment building is really cool in the basement and ground floor, but upstairs it's pretty warm. We have air conditioning, but we've also been running a lot of fans.







Can't find the 6th mold. But 5 outta' 6 ain't bad!








One way I've been coping with the heat is to eat a lot of cool foods, including these homemade popsicles.



























I didn't have much of a method with these, except that I looked at a couple of homemade popsicle recipes with similar ingredients. The sour cream was kind of a last minute addition, but basically, what I did was this:

(Makes 5 popsicles...increase them for your size and number of molds. Ours are about 3" tall.) Blend together about 1 and 1/3 cups strawberries (hulled), 1 banana, scant 1/4 cup plain lowfat yogurt, and 2 tsp nonfat sour cream. Pour into molds and let freeze for at least 3 hours.

I think the sour cream adds some richness and takes away from how sweet the fruit is. These taste really good, and definitely help combat the heat.





























The next strawberry recipe was also sort of a shoot-from-the-hip experience. I've read a lot of blog posts about strawberries and balsamic vinegar, and I consulted a few internet sources before trying it myself. I ended up combining these:

About 3/4 cup of hulled, halved strawberries
Small handful of crumbled feta
2 tbs balsamic vinegar
3/4 tsp mint leaves, chiffonaded
2-3 pinches brown sugar


I made this partially because our lettuce has started to look old and I wanted a salad. It was pretty tasty, and satisfies that salty/sweet tooth I have. Strawberries are good on a mixed green salad, right? I feel like this is the same premise.

I'm trying to convince John that we should go to Lake Erie tomorrow to beat the heat. But the thunderstorms may have started by then and that may solve the problem.