Marie Cookpad

  Did you have a job picking local strawberries when you were a teenager?  I am pretty sure that if you lived in a fairly rural location you probably did.  Local strawberry growers depended on teens hungry for extra money back in the day! I did it for a few weeks every summer for a couple of years. It was a back breaking labour spending the day crouched low to the ground and in hot sun.  You picked long and hard for a few dollars a day, but we were grateful for the work. The farmers would actually send a truck to pick you up and take you to the strawberry fields.   I wonder if teens still pick berries for money?   Or do our farmers have to rely on immigrants.  I don't know.  You would have thought all that picking would have soured my taste for berries, but nope.  I adore strawberries above all other berries. I don't think there is a way I could ever not like them, and here in the UK we grow some of the best.   One thing we all real...

  It had to be done. Tis the season and all that. The season for delicious rhubarb and strawberry desserts.  Desserts such as Strawberry & Rhubarb Crisp.  A family tradition going back bazillions of years!   Strawberry & Rhubarb Crisp is an old family favourite. It is something my mother made and her mother before her. It is a delicious dessert that I made for my own family when they were growing up and it is a dessert I still make at least once a year for my husband.   Even though it is not something I can still enjoy myself, it is something I can make for him and that he can enjoy to his heart's content.  I have cut my original recipe in half to make only four servings because we are only two and he can only eat so much.   So if you are a larger family, or if you just plain want more of it, feel free to double up all of the ingredients and pop it into a 9 inch square baking dish. It will require the same amount of time to cook, or possibly a ...

  Earlier this week we had a surprise package of goodies delivered to our doorstep by someone in our church.  It was filled with all sorts of lovely things.  Chocolate, cookies, a bar of carbolic soap, hand wash, powdered milk, apples, pears, cherries, face masks,  dry potato flakes and a lovely basket of the sweetest smallest strawberries.   It was a really nice surprise!   The cherries got eaten and enjoyed right on the night!  Oh but they were some good.  Todd's enjoyed the pears, I am enjoying the apples and today I baked us a lovely Strawberry Cake Pie wih some of the berries.   The smaller the berry the sweeter the fruit and these were all about the size of grapes and so tasty.  So what exactly is a cake pie?  I can hear you asking  . . . .   Its not really a pie because there is no crust and its not really a cake because it doesn't rise like a cake, but it has a texture very similar to a cake. (There is no leav...