Bountiful Basketts

I'm fairly new to Bountiful Basketts, while in Prescott Valley I had many friends that participated and they loved it. While living in Hurricane I remember my mom doing it a few times too. We've been in Alton now for almost a year and all my sister-in-laws participate too. I don't know why it's taken me so long to jump on the band wagon and participate myself. About 6 weeks ago my sister-in-law called and asked if I wanted a baskett. Instead of creating my own account she'd order an extra one for me. I went ahead and gave it a try. I loved it and even Kory loved it. After we recieved our 1st baskett Kory asked me why I had never done it before. Uh.... Don't really know.  Being lazy I have still never created my own account. My sister-in-law is great to call me each monday morning to tell me what they have to offer. Sometimes I participate by ordering a baskett or one of the many extra's they have to offer by placing my order with hers.  This past week she told me that one of the extra's was strawberries. I was very interested in those. I was told that each person could only order 8-1lb. containers of strawberries which would be about $1.30 a piece. Having recently been to the grocery store and seeing strawberries still at $2.50 I thought this would be a great deal.  My sister-in-law only wanted 2 containers so I told her I'd take the rest. I THOUGHT I was only getting 6-1lb containers of strawberries. You can imagine my suprise when I ended up with this on my kitchen table saturday morning. It wasn't 6-1lb containers but 6 flats of 8-1lb. containers. What do you do with an unexpected 48 containers of strawberries?

Saturday I quickly pulled out all my canning supplies. To my delight I had many, many, many boxes of pectin left over from last season. I then pulled out every Freezer Container we owned and made some fresh freezer jam. I was able to use up 1 entire flat and made about 23 containers of jam.  

Still having 5 flats left I took one flat, rinsed and cut the stems off, froze them on a cookie sheet individually and then put them all in a freezer bag. During the summer we make fruit smoothies almost on a daily basis. I think these strawberries will make a great contribution to our smoothies this year.

 

For family home evening tonight the kids and I dipped 4 containers of strawberries in melted chocolate. Some we left plain and others we dipped in coconut and nuts. They were so yummy! Maybe a little too yummy. I had to tell the kids NO MORE several times! I'm afraid they all may be visiting the bathroom a little more than usual tommorrow. We should probably wait a day or two and then the kids would like to dip some more.

I spent most of my day in Cedar today and seriously "cleaned out" Wal Mart's stash of freezer containers and pectin. Unfortunately they only had 4 boxes of pectin but I'm hoping with the boxes I still have left from last year I'll be able to turn most of the remaining strawberries into jam. I don't know though. I still have 3 1/2 flats left. That's a lot of strawberries.