Holy Smokes! It's strawberry season again!

There is much joy to be had in seasonal eating. Eating lots of what's fresh and in season right now and when the growing season is over its gone. Ok, who am I kidding. It's gorging yourself on what is in season until you've run out of ways to prepare it and can't wait to stop seeing it when walk into the garden. Then, next season you excitedly welcome it back! Last Saturday I did the happy dance when I saw the first strawberries of the season. I love shortcake. All kinds of shortcake, but particularly, strawberry shortcake!

I got home and found a recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook and set about baking some shortcake biscuits. (I am a biscuit kind of shortcake person, sweet crumbly, yummy biscuits!). I will also interject that we have a couple of dairy goats so we use goat milk in all our cooking and baking. Well, a few weeks ago I saw goat BUTTER in a healthfood store. I was always quite curious about making butter out of goat milk so I bought a pound to see what it was like. I used a little pat of butter on some toast and it was good. Well, the label said that goat butter is great for baking so I thought, cool, I am going to use it in my shortcake! I finished the dough, dropped spoonfuls onto the baking sheet and popped it in the oven and then started to cut up my delicious, red strawberries....

About halfway through my strawberries, I started hearing a weird noise. I wasn't sure where it was coming from. It was kind of a sputtering sound. I started to look around me and realized the noise was coming from somewhere near the oven. Oh wait, it's coming from INSIDE the oven....slowly I crack open the oven door and turn on the light. Holy Smokes! There's a fire in the oven! Butter was running off the baking sheet, landing on the heating element and bursting into flames (hence my sputtering sound)!

To make a long story short, I dumped the rest of the running butter off the tray and into a pan, no fuel, no more fire! I put the tray back in the oven for the last few minutes of baking and VOILA! They came out just fine!

STRAWBERRIES in season NOW! Get 'em while their HOT!
~Tara (from Wash Your Mouth Out Soap)