Every year, pre-season strawberries pull me in with their lovely red flesh and wonderful smell, and then when I inevitably buy and eat them, they taste like vinegar and sadness. It seems like sacrilege to waste them, though, so until I learn self-control, I'll be making a lot of compotes. This is the one I made today. It pretty much tasted like very fancy, slightly warm jam.
Strawberry compote for the terminally impatient
Serves 2 or 3
Ingredients:
5 or 6 rubbish strawberries
Zest of 0.25 lemon
Juice of 0.25 lemon (optional, because they're probably sour enough already)
1 tbsp sugar
0.25 tsp vanilla essence
Directions:
Slice the strawberries.
Put all the ingredients in a saucepan over a low heat and cook until the strawberries are soft - around 5 minutes
Mash with a fork
Serve with anything you like. I went for a croissant and a spoonful of double cream because apparently my resolution this year is to become fat like a house.
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Those are not seeds on the outside, but the acautl fruits of the strawberry. Quoting the excellent On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee:"The seeds are acautlly miniature dry fruits (achenes) similar to buckwheat and sunflower "seeds," and the fleshy portion is the flower's swollen base, not its ovary." Remember that strawberries don't ripen after being picked, so get fresh quebec berries while you can, which is all summer. It is a crime to sell the unripe-when-picked california strawberry imports, which should have "UNRIPE FRUIT" located predominately on the label. Sure, it's a non-monetary trade tariff, but the right to a decent ripe strawberry that isn't a week old is a vital part of authentic living (here I am disagreeing with Andrew Potter and his recent book on the lack of acautl authenticity in the acautl branding of products as containing "Authenticity"). I was just forced to eat a retirement present of unripe foreign fruit in a decorative cut-fruit arrangement from edible arrangements. So I have a bit of a hate-on for imported fake strawberries at the moment.