Dining Guide

By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

Strawberries they're red, ripe and ready for picking.

Loaded with vitamin C, low in calories and naturally sweet, strawberries are now at their peak of perfection. Cottle Stawberry Farms on Ellis Road in Fayetteville expects to have plenty of fruit available for handpicking through the first week of June. A gallon bucket of strawberries picked by the customer costs $7, said Trixie Williams at Cottle's.

For $2 more, busy shoppers can buy a gallon ready-picked. Adams Farms, on west Ga. Highway 54 between Fayetteville and Peachtree City, has more strawberries ripening and expects to add blackberries to their pick-your-own menu in about 10 days. According to Virginia Adams, this is their first year growing blackberries. Adams Farms provides pickers with baskets and charges by the pound.

If you prefer your strawberries picked, washed and packaged, try Driscoll's, found at most area grocery chains. Touted as the "finest berries in the world," Driscoll's are large, juicy and flavorful.

Recently, Leslie Revsin, a New York-based chef who is known for her talent of blending ingredients and flavors in distinctive ways, demonstrated some of her favorite berry recipes at Cooking Light's GrandStand '99 in Atlanta. A strawberry dessert served in a lemon-lavender syrup was prepared by Revsin in her makeshift stage kitchen with beautiful results.

A tiny lavender garnish topped her springtime specialty. (See recipe on page 2) "The lemon-lavender syrup has a lovely floral quality that pairs beautifully with the sweet Driscoll's berries. It's a perfect, unexpected marriage of herbs and heavenly berries," Revsin said.

Cooks also can store some seasonal sweetness away for a winter treat by freezing. The Cooperative Extension Service of the University of Georgia (at the Fayette County Administrative Complex) has racks of instructive brochures and flyers on the subject. Extension foods specialist Susan J. Reynolds says, "Freezing is one of the easiest, most convenient and least time consuming ways to prepare foods at home... properly frozen fruits will retain much of their fresh flavor and nutritive value. Their texture, however, may be somewhat softer than that of fresh fruit," she says.

Strawberry jelly lovers who cringe at the caloric content derived from sugar can spread their jelly and eat it too.

The extension office also offers recipes for jellied products without added sugar. "Strawberry jam with pectin" makes about two or three half-pint jars with one tablespoon equalling a scant five calories. It calls for:

1 quart of cleaned strawberries

3 to 4 teaspoons of liquid artificial sweetener

1 package of powdered fruit pectin

1 tablespoon of lemon juice and red food coloring as desired.

Crush the strawberries in a one-and-a-half quart saucepan. Stir in artificial sweetener, food coloring, powdered fruit pectin, and lemon juice. Bring to a boil and boil one minute. Remove from heat. Continue to stir two minutes, Pour into freezer containers, cover and freeze. Thaw for use keep them refrigerated.

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