There are quite a few rooms full of books in this novel…nearly every scene is somehow described as a setting for one of Irma Arcuri’s beautiful books. But here are two of my favorites from the novel.

The arrival of Irma’s books:

The books arrived in one week, two refrigerator-sized boxes with protective packaging. They were packed alphabetically, impact-guarded, and marked fragile. He shelved them the way she shelved them–alphabetically, with no consideration of history, nationality, genre, or theme. They transcended these divisions, and Philip knew–somehow understood–that this was why she’d had them. They were splendorous together, in their cloth and leather bindings of jewel toned yellow, green, red or blue, or the more austere black and burgundy. No jackets, with titles embossed in gold, silver, brass, or iron. Most she had re-bound or restored herself, using period materials and tools. This was easy, she told him, because we use tools similar to those used since the fifteenth century. I could walk into an eighteenth century bookbinder’s shop, she explained, and have no trouble sewing up Defoe’s first volumes. Her shop and her mentor’s shop looked like museums, with their mallets and presses, awls and knives. Their work floors held the smells of old leathers, parchment, and linseed. Sometimes in their dark corners he would find a jar filled with a petrified volume soaking in amber linseed, the book’s fused pages beginning to separate like petals. If he lingered too long by one of these jars, she would crouch behind it and peer at him through the xanthic oil, her face magnified, tinted, and swirled around sharply focused eyes. Eyes aimed at him, not the sloughing book fossil. If we stir it softly with a wooden spoon, she taunted, it will all dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. (p.10)

The book collector and her husband:

Miriam Haupt loved Irma. She brokered antiquarian books, but in her retirement had become exclusively a collector. She and her husband owned a small apartment building, painted blue alongside the many other apartment buildings mortared together, all left to face to the colors of again paper along one continuous wall. Each flat in the Haupt building was filled with books. The Haupts themselves dwelled on the second floor, every room lined with bookshelves. The other floors were occupied exclusively by books and a wandering cat to fend off mice. Each decade of Miriam’s retirement seemed marked by the ousting of a tenant and the designation of another floor for books. Her husband Vlad Ballestreros, a professor of mycology at the university, often got himself lost in the stacks. He loved their smells, the breath of the molds and fungi he studied. Whenever Philip went with Irma to visit, Senor Ballestreros could be heard thumping around on one of the floors and he would eventually call down, or up, in his shaky Castilian croak and say he would be right there to join. He would only appear hours later, blinking and out of breath as though he had just surfaced from a dive or dream.

His fly fishing pole gleams,
it’s the shiniest thing about him.
His arm draws back, his wrist snaps
forward, his shoulders roll and his torso
twists fluid and smooth, over and over,
like dancing with your feet braced.

The line arches out, floats over the dirt
comes gently down and pulls
back a breadth before it can land;
the pole bends, whips, draws infinity
symbols in the air above his head.

Behind his back, traffic mutters
ignored and ignoring.

In front of his feet, the dead
winter grass doesn’t stir.

Before his eyes, river water
rushes, sun bright on its racing,
tumbling surface and fish hide
unseen in the calmer eddies
behind the rocks.

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.   Really, since this was the very first book I noticed someone reading, I thought it was a good omen.

Killer Angels by Jeff Shaara

Santa Fe Rules by Stuart Woods

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.   I have a private theory that in any given group of people reading books, one of them will be reading this one.

Three Cups of Tea

Olive Kitteredge

Great Expectations (Penguin Classics edition) Which begs the question, why, o why would anyone want to read a Dickens novel sitting in a center seat near the engines on a four hour flight that was over-booked?

Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. That would be me. The guy two rows up may have been trying to escape the crowded conditions by reading Dickens. But I, on the other hand, was reading about Joseph Banks in Tahiti. He was having a really good time.

I didn’t see a single Kindle or other eReader, and I was looking. Even the folks with iPhones seemed to be mostly playing games and watching videos. I’m not sure what it means that the books I saw people reading on a plane trip to Vegas included Dickens and Tim O’Brien, but I found it oddly comforting.

Conversation

The tree said to the sunlight:
How is it I do not grow tired?

The sun said to the evergreen:
You are what I turn into

When I want to touch the earth.

The Soul Tree ended up as an Okra Pick from Southern indie booksellers, despite its list price of $49.95. (We used soy ink and environmentally-friendly printing methods, said the author, because we couldn’t do a book celebrating nature and destroy it in the process). But what I like about the poems is their immediacy, against the eternal feeling of mountains and old trees.

A River Dies of Thirst, Mahmoud Darwish

Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed by life, I’ll pick up random books from my shelves and open them to random pages.  It’s a habit I’ve had since I was a very young girl and I’m sorry to say that it originally came from reading Richard Bach’s Illuminations. But now, I’m not looking for messages from the universe. It is more like having a mental reset button, or seeking a change of internal scenery. If I’m lucky, I’ll breathe in the words, and life will be a little bit different when I look back up from the page. If that happens, I’ll post it here.

Summer and winter

There is nothing new. The seasons here are two:
a summer as long as a far away minaret
and a winter like a nun praying
As for spring
it cannot stop
except to say: ‘Greetings to you
on Ascension Day’
While autumn
is merely a place of seclusion
in which to contemplate how much of our life we have lost
on the return journey
‘Where did we leave our life behind?’ I asked the butterfly
circling around in the light
and it burnt up in its tears.

-Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books, 2009)

Tomosas

I’m in the middle of a small war right now with the neighborhood stray cat. He has decided that the best place to hang out while stalking rabbits is in the middle of my tomato plants. This is an issue for me because a) I like to see bunnies on my lawn and I don’t particularly want them killed and b) the cat does a little more than just sit in the garden, if you know what I mean. And while I’m all about homegrown food and organic gardening, finding cat droppings in the middle of my tomato patch is a little TOO organic for me.

My mother has always been an avid gardener. I’ll never forget the year she planted–in a fit of misguided enthusiasm–not one, not two, but SIX hills of zucchini. I believe our backyard accounted for about 5% of the world’s production of zucchini that year. But once I left home I lost whatever skills I might have gleaned. I lived in a series of run-down and dark apartments and tended to be more concerned with finding the money for dinner than trying to actually grow it. My thumb never got any greener than a few pots of herbs on a kitchen windowsill.

This changed when I moved south. Suddenly I was living in houses, not apartments, and living in a climate with a 286-day growing season, not a 120-day one. I became what you might call a “Darwinian” gardener–the plants in my garden must survive in a climate of benign neglect, with rare attempts at weeding or pruning, and only infrequent watering. Lettuce is allowed to bolt and re-seed. Compost is left to its own devices. I currently have a rather vigorous pumpkin vine growing where last year’s jack-o-lantern fell from the porch and was allowed to return to the earth unhindered. But there is one type of plant that is exempt from my general mistreatment–the tomato.

I still remember the first time I ever tasted southern Sweet 100s cherry tomatoes as one of the defining foodie moments of my life. Tomatoes that you could eat like candy! I was beyond shocked, and immediately went looking at farmer supply stores for plants. In an unconscious imitation of my mother’s earlier enthusiasm, I bought six. I think I was responsible for about 5% of the world’s production of cherry tomatoes that year. Since that time, I have always had tomatoes in my southern garden–in a full vegetable bed if I had the space and time, or in large pots on the porch if I didn’t. I grew Sweet 100’s for their taste and Better Boys because that is what the neighbors grew. And then one day I saw a picture of a Costoluto Genovese in a seed catalog. It was a princess of a tomato, an heirloom with a lovely lobed shape so that when sliced, each slice had beautifully scalloped edges. It was supposed to be an excellent slicing tomato, and an excellent sauce tomato, but not a tomato with a long shelf life. This last caveat did not phase me because I lived, at the time, in a tiny house with no air conditioning. So in the summertime nothing had a shelf life longer than about six hours.

For the first time in my life, I fell in love with a food–with a specific kind of food. With a specific variety of a specific kind of food. It was the mere sight of the Costoluto Genovese tomato that made me decide to try growing tomatoes from seed. I started combing seed catalogs for other heirlooms. Suddenly tomatoes were not those mushy, watery, tasteless things you slid off your burgers. They were fun and exciting and pretty and–oh yeah–tasted good. I tried a rainbow of cultivars from Yellow Pears to Brandywine Pinks to Cherokee Purples (which get my vote as the ugliest tomato ever). I grew San Marzanos and Principe Borgheses with the idea that I’d do a lot of canning (I never got around to it). I grew a few yellow and orange tomato varieties and ended up with the most lovely tomato salads. I toyed with the idea of growing “Green Zebras” and “Russian Blacks” but lost my nerve.

It isn’t always clear what the term “heirloom” means. In general, the term implies that the cultivar has been around for more than fifty years. It also implies that the plants are open-pollinated (you know, by bees and things). But this isn’t always the case–some hybrids (which require controlled pollination) like yellow pears are considered heirlooms, possibly because they are simply so pretty. Open pollination comes with its own set of considerations. Heirloom tomatoes can’t be bred for disease resistance, for example. Their yield is more unpredictable since they depend on a supply of willing and happy pollinators. Heirloom varieties also must be picked before they become fully ripe, since they are not bred for long shelf lives and once ripe, must be eaten almost immediately.

There are an astonishing number of “heirloom” tomato varieties available–some of them with stories as colorful as their skins. My favorite is the “Mortgage Lifter”, aka “Radiator Charlie.” It sounds like a thug from a Chicago mob but it was so named, apocryphally, by a man named MC Byles, who sold the cultivar for a dollar a plant to pay off his house when his radiator business went under during the Depression. Alas, Mortgage Lifters and Brandywine Pinks–the two heirlooms that may be responsible for the current craze in heirloom varieties–defied my gardening skills. They are “beefteak” tomatoes–the kind with very large fruit that is very solid and meaty, with small seed cavities. I learned after several frustrating years that I did not have the mentality to grow goliath-sized beefsteak tomatoes–I invariably lost them to the bugs, worms, moths and caterpillars that flourish in the south as easily as do the plants. I also found, through trial and error, that cultivars that tend towards odd shapes–the pointed San Marzanos, for example, and even my lovely lobed Costoluto Genovese–often developed cracks and spots if, as often happened, I was not too diligent about watering.

The tomatoes the neighborhood cat finds so useful for stalking (among other things) are Tomosas and Sweet 100s; what I think of as my “old reliables.” (A term I adopted from a children’s book called Junket about a city family that buys a farm without knowing anything about farming).  I planted them because it is a new house and a new garden and there was nothing established. They are more forgiving about watering (or the lack thereof) and they are quite forgiving about wildlife. It is a struggle just to keep the beds relatively cat- and rabbit- free without fussing over a tomato that came from a plant someone found in a holler somewhere in the Appalachian mountains.

Heirloom Tomato Patch, June 3, 2009

Although, I believe I have one of those, because this year a good friend dropped off a flat of 16 different heirloom tomato plants–no single one alike.  They were the leftovers from some “combat obesity” drive, if you can believe it, although by the time they got to me they were all looking a little spindly and forlorn in their red plastic beer cups. Here’s a list of the plants:

Black (deep red)

Black from Tula- regular leaf, 8-12oz., purple-black, great flavor, loves heat

Black Cherry- black (deep red), regular leaf, abundant

Bicolor, white, green-when-ripe, yellow, or orange

Big Rainbow- regular leaf, deep gold with red splashes, good flavor, fair yield

Earl of Edgecombe- regular leaf, orange color, big producer, 6-12oz, grows in clusters, heat and humidity tolerant

Super Snow White- ivory, regular leaf, large, ~75days to production

Isis Candy- regular leaf, yellow-gold color, very large, low yield, ~80 days to production

Pink

Eva Purple Ball- regular leaf, deep pink, uniform color, disease and bug resistant

Giant Belgium- regular leaf, pink color, high yields

Good for Tomato Paste/Sauce

Rio Grande- regular leaf, red, very productive, great flavor, good for paste

Marianne’s Peace- dark pink, potato leaf, very productive, good for paste

San Marzano- a variety of plum tomato considered by many chefs to be the best sauce tomatoes in the world, gift from the Kingdom of Peru to the Kingdom of Naples in 1770, thinner and pointier than Roma tomatoes, first grown in volcanic soil of Mt.Vesuvius

Red

Red Calabash-regular leaf, fluted, red color, 69-80 days to production

Camp Joy- red, regular leaf, strong vines, ~60 days to production

Clint Eastwood’s Rowdy Red-really red, robust, 8oz. globes

Tondo Liscio- smooth, round, Italian eating tomato, red color

Cuor di Bue- red color, also known as the ”Bulls Heart” and ”Giant Ox Heart” tomato. Superb tasting, fleshy,”Ox Heart” beef tomato, so called because of its size and shape, a lovely slicing tomato due to it’s meaty flesh, and few seeds, unbeatable in salads or with slices of fresh Mozzarella and basil, fruits typically 150-180g each in weight, but can get much larger.

Heirloom tomato patch, June 27, 2009

Honestly. “Clint Eastwood Rowdy Red?” I wanted to grow these just because of the names.  So far, they are looking pretty good.

If you are interested in growing heirloom tomatoes, you are in luck. There are a couple of local nurseries that grow varieties especially at home here in the hot and humid Southeast. Shelton Herb Farm is where I go for my Sweet 100s plants. (Do not buy six plants unless you are trying to feed a small country).

Shelton Herb Farm
340 Goodman Road
Leland, NC 28451
(off Route 17)

The local farmers’ markets, such as the Riverfront market on Saturdays downtown, or the Pender County market on Wednesday mornings at Poplar Grove also have a few local farms who supply heirloom vegetables (I picked up a gorgeous bunch of multicolored carrots at the Riverfront Market last Saturday that were almost too pretty to eat). And while it is long past the time when you could start your tomatoes from seed, there are at least two seed suppliers that are excellent resources for heirloom varieties if you want to plan for next year:

Seed Savers Exchange
www.seedsavers.org

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
www.southernexposure.com

In the meantime, you can always raid your neighbor’s garden. The tomatoes will still be green for at least another two weeks, but even green tomatoes have their uses:

Fried Green Tomatoes:

2 lb Green tomatoes
4 ea Eggs
1 1/4 c Corn meal
3/4 c Water
1/4 c Minced chives
1 tb Salt
1/4 ts Pepper, fresh ground
1/4 c Butter or margarine

Slice the tomatoes 1/2 inch thick, but do not peel or core. Drain
well between several thicknesses of paper toweling until most of the
moisture of the tomatoes is absorbed. While the tomatoes are
draining, make a batter by beating the eggs until light, then mixing
in the corn meal, water, minced chives, salt and pepper. In a large,
heavy iron skillet, heat the butter or margarine until bubbly. Dip
the tomato slices into batter, and brown quickly on both sides. Serve
at once.

I’ve been re-reading Gatsby. And oddly enough, although I am quite convinced that this is the perfect novel, and despite the fact that I’m on my third or fourth reading, and that I am usually inclined to remember when a book talks about rooms full of books, I remembered almost nothing about this odd little scene in Gatsby’s library.

I suppose everyone who prides themselves on their personal library has secretly imagined their books as a kind of ultra-flattering self-portrait. Who hasn’t gazed at their own bookshelves and imagined, smugly, what impressive conclusions a stranger doing the same might draw about their their owner?  Fitzgerald has a rather biting, unkind comment about this sort of self-conceit in this scene, which occurs before the narrator has ever spoken to Gatbsy. Up until this moment, he knows his neighbor only from a late evening sighting on the lawn, and a collection of wild rumors about his exploits during the Great War.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact, you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our skepticism for granted he rushed to the bookcasses and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

A is for Austen, B is for Bronte, C is for Charles and D is for Dickens. I learned my alphaget in this shop. My father walking along the shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later. The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life.”

–Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (Atria, 2006)

Some of the plays, however, are proving elusive. As it turns out, Pericles is not high up on anyone’s list of Shakespeare-that-must-be-performed. So to help keep my resolution, I procured for myself a copy of the Arkangel Shakespeare, a massive box of full audio productions of each play on CD.  And I’m going through them one by one, approximately in order of when they were written.

I’ve already written about some of them:

Henry VI, parts i, ii, and iii

Richard III

Richard III may well be my favorite Shakespeare play, my distressing introduction notwithstanding.

But now I am onto A Comedy of Errors, which after Richard seems positively fluffy.  And I made several discoveries:

First, in the Arkangel production David Tennant plays Antipholus of Syracuse, and even just listening to the performance, without actually seeing it, it was awfully hard not to think “That’s the Doctor!”  For a few scenes I amused myself with wondering where they would put the TARDIS in the set.

More importantly, though, was the discovery that Comedy of Errors relies heavily on visual cues and mistaken impressions and what my friend Lev calls “smart staging.”  I had already had trouble deciphering the fight scenes in the Henry VI plays, so you can imagine my confusion here.

Nevertheless, the play had its moments–the point where Dromio (of Syracuse) is describing to his master the “beauties” of a kitchen wench that is convinced they are to be married is pretty hilarious:

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

Then she bears some breadth?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out
countries in her.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

In what part of her body stands Ireland?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus finds this a great joke, and goes on to name all the countries, to which Dromio responds with some awful insult against the lady’s looks for each.  America, “…embellished with/ rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich/aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole/ armadoes of caracks to be ballast…” is to be found on the poor woman’s nose. I’m sure by the end of the bit Shakespeare’s audiences were howling.  (You can read the full exchange here)

I did get to see an actual production of the play, put on by our Youth Shakespeare Company for our local outdoor “Shakespeare on the Green” festival. Everyone in the company is under 18. The actors playing the two Dromios were around 12. This took some getting used to–especially since the actors playing the two Antipholus’ were closer to 16 or 17. (And the girl playing the ugly kitchen maid was at least this old). So the physical comedy was a little strange. And the play had been edited slightly to get rid of some of the more salacious inuendos (including the entire exchange above), which did little to alleviate the oddity of the scenes in any case. But perhaps it was in keeping. Certianly in Shakespeare’s time many of the parts–especially the female parts–would have been played by young pretty boys.

In any case, I was glad to actually see the performance, and to have a visual in my mind for when I listened, for the second time, to the audio.  After becoming so involved with Richard III, Comedy of Errors was perhaps doomed to pale. But the ready wit, and the clever, playful language was still very much in evidence. I was not moved, but I was certainly entertained.

“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.” –Dr. William Butler, 17th Century English Writer

It was maybe two or three weeks ago that I was driving back from a trip to the hardware store, my van weighted down with the bags of compost and mulch that were going into the garden when I first saw it–the little red wooden farm stand set up in the parking lot of the gas station on the corner of RT 17 and RT 210, with a banner that said Lewis Farms and a red painted strawberry. I didn’t even hesitate. I swung into the station and spent the last ten bucks in my pocket on two quarts of freshly-picked, locally grown strawberries.

I grew up in western New York state, which is known, aside from its snowy winters, as “the fruit basket” because of its extensive orchards and rich farm land. This was a bounty that my mother did not neglect to appreciate–she often took the family on trips to the farms in search of apples, pears, plums, cherries, and strawberries. As children my brother, sister and I could mark the passing of the year by the fruit that was in season. We visited smaller farms with”U-pick” orchards and fields, and Mom, blithely unconcerned about child labor laws, would turn us loose with baskets and bushels and tell us to fill them. I learned to climb trees by picking apples in the fall. I learned I was impervious to wasp stings picking plums in the summer. And I learned that spring was really here when strawberries were in season.

Of course, I know now that there are more economical ways to buy strawberries. When I was older I realized that the strawberries we were paying for the privilege to pick were twice as expensive as the ones we could buy already packed in their little plastic pint baskets. I was incensed when I discovered this, until my mother, ever practical, pointed out that we kids ate at least as many berries as we put in our baskets out on the field. I’m not sure why mom made all the extra effort to drag three kids out to farm country to get themselves dirty and exhausted picking fruit, but I am glad she did. Not only did these “u-pick” orchard visits give us a fair amount of exercise, but we learned first hand that not all cherries or apples were alike. I discovered the difference between a MacIntosh apple and a Yellow Delicious. And I came to associate the passing of each month with the smell of the fruit in the car as we drove home, hot, weary and happy, with baskets of berries on our laps–too full to eat any more, even if we wanted to. To this day, I have a very Proustian moment whenever I smell strawberries under the hot sun. It takes me right back to those days of kneeling in the sandy fields under a spring sun, floppy hat on my head, my grubby fingers greedily pulling at even the not-quite-ripe berries and cramming them into my mouth.

Those childhood memories of fresh-picked berries made such an impression on me that for the rest of my life I have been disappointed by the taste of strawberries that I haven’t picked myself, or at least bought from some small roadside stand. I’m not above picking up a few pints of the one billion pounds of strawberries shipped out of the state of California now and then, but they never taste as good as the local ones. They are too clean, perhaps. Too sterilized. They never taste of the sun and sand and they never smell of the country. So I really only indulge myself in strawberries when they show up in the farmer’s markets, and once they are gone, I don’t eat them again until spring comes around the next year. And when I see the little red wooden stand show up at the 17/210 intersection, my heart gives a little leap of joy. I’m a little past crawling out in the fields for my berries, but Lewis Farms in Pender County is where I like to buy them (already picked). And if you are into picking them yourself–or you just want to tire out your kids–now is the time. Strawberry season peaks in May, and their stand out on Gordon Road offers homemade ice cream to hot and tired pickers. They also have a u-pick spot out on Castle Hayne Road, near GE. Both spots are open these days from 8-6 during the week, and 1-6 on Sundays.

There are thousands of recipes for strawberries–from the erotically-charged strawberries-and-champagne to the rather homey strawberry shortcake. I confess, I don’t know any of them. Strawberries to me are one of nature’s perfect foods–so delicious in themselves that I never can bring myself to waste them in some dessert recipe. Mom used to make sure we brought home enough berries that she could make jam, but eventually even she decided that was a terrible waste. Eight berries give you all the Vitamin C you will need for the day. A cup of berries is about 55 calories. You might as well just eat them plain, because anything else is just overkill. The people who chop up strawberries and pile them on those little gold cakes and spray them with that canned whipped cream are committing a culinary crime. (The original strawberry shortcake is a Native American thing–colonists watched the Indians mash up small wild berries with cornmeal to make little cakes. The colonists liked the idea, but had an addiction to sugar that haunts American cooking to this day.)

Besides, strawberries are a little like sushi–best if eaten within a few hours of being picked. They are not improved by refrigeration, and the pigments that make strawberries red, anthocyanin, are heat sensitive. They break apart and turn brown when exposed to heat or warm temperatures. So really, your best bet is to just eat them on the way home from the farm stand. Don’t wash them until you are ready to eat them, and eat them directly after you have washed them. In a pinch, you can wait until dinner, but not any longer than that. If you want them for breakfast the next morning, then put them in the fridge unwashed, and let them come to room temperature before you start cutting them up over your cereal.

And although I almost never eat strawberries anyway but right out of the bowl, I did make this salad once, and it was so good that it made my very short list of “approved uses for strawberries.” (The other approved uses are not exactly “recipes”):

Strawberry and Spinach Salad
1 pint fresh strawberries
2 bunches fresh spinach
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons minced green onion
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup cider vinegar
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1. Wash strawberries under cool running water. Remove caps and set aside to drain.
2. Wash spinach and remove large tough stems. Tear large leaves into small pieces. Drain.
3. In a medium bowl combine remaining ingredients and whisk together.
4. Slice strawberries into halves or quarters and place in a large bowl. Add dry spinach.
5. Pour dressing over all and toss.
Makes 8 servings.