Buggy, yet Blissful

It was the perfect day yesterday.

 

It was everything Spring should be: warm but breezy and filled with backyard potlucks. The food was perfect, the weather was perfect, the bugs were...not perfect. But, c'est la vie when you live in Western Mass and the weather has alternated between tons of rain and heat. We slathered on the neem infused bug repellent and hoped for the best. (The best included waking up with a few red bumps, but what can you do. It was worth it).

We made some pasta salad with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil from our garden. It went perfectly with savory mushroom bread pudding, coconut rice/avocado burritos, curried deviled eggs and sauteed greens.

Picnic perfection

We topped the meal off with homemade strawberry lime sorbet (recipe below) made with strawberries we picked this past weekend (more on that later this week).

I kind of winged it with the strawberry sorbet, but it came out perfectly (I figured that it's pretty hard to mess up sorbet, but this ended up being insanely awesome, and I'll be making another batch tomorrow. yum).

Hull/chop a quart and a 1/2 of strawberries and mix with 1/2 cup of sugar. Fridge for about an hour or 2, stirring occasionally. Zest one lime into the bowl of strawberries and add the juice of said lime. Blend/puree the strawberry mixture till smooth. (I used our hand blender and it was easy peasy and little mess). Then put in ice cream maker and follow the directions for sorbet. I use a Kitchen Aid mixer ice cream attachment and churned it for about 20 minutes before putting it into a container and into the freezer for a few hours before serving. Dee-lish.