Strawberry Fields

Over the weekend, I saw a deal on strawberries that I couldn't pass up. I found myself with 6 pounds of beautiful, red berries and I needed a plan. Here's what happened:

I pureed 2 pounds of the strawberries to start with. We made ice cream in a bag and added about 2 cups of the puree into the bag. I made strawberry and orange soap. Tomorrow I make strawberry jam. I'll probably still have strawberries left over ;)

This was our first time making ice cream in a bag, and it was super easy and fun! We made three different types: strawberry, peanut butter, and almond. Here's the recipe that we used:

1 cup half and half
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pint-size ziplock bag
1 gallon-size ziplock bag
Ice cubes (enough to fill each gallon-size bag about half full)
1/2 cup Kosher salt
*whatever mix-ins you like

In the small bag, mix up the sugar, half & half, and vanilla extract. Put the ice and salt into the gallon size bag. Put the small bag into the big bag and shake that motha up! It took about 5ish minutes for the ice cream to harden.
We stirred the pureed strawberries into the mixture in the small bag before we began shaking. It turned into a wonderful strawberry ice cream! To the second bag, we stirred in organic powdered peanut butter before shaking. The hubs LOVED it! To my bag, I omitted the vanilla extract and used almond extract, instead. Unfortunately, I forgot to add the sugar to my bag, so it wasn't very delicious :(

After making all that ice cream, I still had lots of strawberry puree to use up. I mixed up about 2-1/2 pounds of glycerin soap and added the strawberry puree and some orange essential oil. I poured most of the mix into a loaf mold, which is setting as I write this. The rest went into sea creature molds for Blaise to use in his bath :) Once the soap is cured, you'll be able to buy it through my Etsy site!

I still have a ton of strawberries left, so I'll be making strawberry jam this week. I'll let you know how it turns out!