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As I was watching the third season of Orange Is The New Black and then posting about it yesterday, I kept thinking about the struggles with food that the women had throughout the season. Granted, food has always been a focus in the show. Whether or not Red is in charge of the kitchen, Piper’s initial insult to Red in Season 1 (leading her to almost starve), and the difference between the food served at meals and at the commissary have all been plot lines. In Season 3, the food takes a turn for the worse, and the women find unique strategies for dealing with this downgrade.
Red has always been one of my favorite characters, and I enjoyed her way of turning lemons into lemonade. Rather than attempt to cheat the system, as many of the other inmates are attempting to do, Red literally reaps what she has sown, finally getting some use out of her garden. As the different vegetables from the garden are fully ripe, she hosts exclusive dinners based around that fresh produce, using every bit of it that she could to put out a delicious meal, returning to her scrimping, Russian roots.
I find myself thinking of her, and the rest of the women, as I enjoy the bounty of fresh produce available to me at this time of year in upstate New York. I decided to challenge myself to cook with an item of produce and to use every bit of it, squeezing every last drop of freshness and goodness from it. My produce of choice? Strawberries.
One way to truly enjoy fresh strawberries (other than just popping them straight into my mouth), is baking with them. I wasn’t in the mood for strawberry shortcake, so I turned to Pinterest and found A Spicy Perspective’s recipe for Fresh Strawberry Yogurt Cake. Yes, please!
The recipe was simple and easy to follow, but the results were astounding. This cake is delicious. The lemon zest accents the strawberries just enough so the cake isn’t too sweet, and the texture is moist and dense, yet somehow still fluffy. Please, make is ASAP. I bet you already have most of the ingredients, and it really showcases the wonderful summer fruit at our disposal right now.
Now of course, what about the pesky problem of those strawberry tops? They obviously didn’t go in the cake, and I need to find some way to use them. Fortunately, I had seen this article a while back and opted to use them to make a berry-infused sun tea.
What is sun tea? It is a method for making iced tea in which you put your tea bags, water, and any other ingredients in a pitcher, and leave that pitcher at a sunny window for a couple of hours. The heat from the sun steeps the tea, and results in a very mellow iced tea. I love sun tea and make it all the time during the summer, this time, including the strawberry tops. The result was delicious and I daresay, Red would be proud.
What are you making with your fresh produce?
Weeken
d Cooking, hosted at Beth Fish Reads, is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs.
The post Food Inspiration from OITNB: Strawberry Yogurt Cake appeared first on Bookworm Inkorporated.
