Sweet Treat

I have started about a dozen blog posts this last week but abandoned all of them because they seemed too whiney, even for me. I still need to post the follow up to the soup dumplings, which did come out pretty well. I never did finish posting about safari or do a Christmas post. Maybe next week I will get to it. Today though I did something it never occurred to me to do, I made syrup.

I don't know why I never thought of making syrup before. When I was a kid and still lived at home, Mom and I would make jelly. Every once in a while a batch wouldn't gel but we didn't get upset, we would just label the jars syrup instead of jelly. Those fruit syrups were really good on pancakes, waffles, french toast, ice cream, a spoon. I have a bit of a sweet tooth, can you tell?

Most weeks a guy that sells strawberries shows up at the gate with a basket full of strawberries. I fork over 500 kwacha and he fills my bowl up and we have fresh fruit. Fruit here is very seasonal. For two weeks there were mulberries in the market then they were just gone. The selection of fruit is much more limited than I expected so I never turn away the strawberry man unless I simply don't have enough money in my purse to pay. That means that I usually end up putting a ziplock full of the uneaten strawberries in the freezer each week. The kids can only eat so many strawberries before they go bad. The strawberries, not the kids. I've made strawberry popsicles, strawberry sorbet, strawberry stuffed crepes, strawberry sherbet and when I suggested making strawberry ice cream this week the kids said "How about chocolate? Or vanilla?" So what to do with the left over strawberries that are starting to get a bit squishy? Make syrup!

My all time favorite syrup is boysenberry syrup, or as the boys prefer to call it poison-berry syrup. For some inexplicable reason I failed to include any in our consumables shipment and since it is a liquid in glass I can't exactly have any shipped to me at post. Arrrgh! The only thing I have to put on my pancakes is Aunt Jemima's or honey. I choose honey, but I'm not too happy about it.

Today I combined a cup of sugar, a cup of water, about 2 cups of strawberries, and a dash of lemon juice then boiled the heck out of it until the berries fell apart and the whole thing got thick. I decided that straining the mess was too much work so I just ran an immersion blender through the syrup to make sure there were no lumps left. It turned out fabulous. It's not boysenberry, but it is darn good, and I can hardly wait until this weekend for pancakes. What is a boysenberry anyway? Does anyone know? Next I am going to try making mango syrup. Yumm.