Strawberries and Cream, Polish-Ukranian style

[shadowspar]

This is a hand-me-down recipe from my Papa (grandfather). Not only it is one of the best damn desserts going, it's hands-down the easiest, too; even easier than boxed pudding mix from the grocery store. Best of all, it lets you make something awesome out of the godawful strawberries we get during winter in the Great White North, bereft as they are of any hint of sweetness after their multi-thousand kilometer journey here.

So easy, it's hardly even a recipe:

• Wash, clean, and dry strawberries; slice them into a bowl.
• Dredge them in sugar: generously dust with granulated sugar, toss to mix, and dust again.
• Set them aside for a half hour or longer. The sugar makes the juices leach out of the strawberries, yielding a sort of strawberry syrup.
• Throw in a few dollops of sour cream (14% preferably) and stir the whole mess together.
• Divvy up into bowls & serve.

The timing on this often works well at dinnertime: slice & sugar the strawberries while the main course finishes cooking, and by the time the end of the meal rolls around, you're ready to lob in the sour cream and dish it up. If you want to turn down the fat numbers, better to go with a mild yogurt than some of the nasty reduced-fat "sour cream product" that lurks on supermarket shelves. Here, we just recently got a wonderful 2% yogurt that's almost as good in this recipe as full-fat sour cream, at least in my estimation.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Ooo, sour cream? My family uses whipped cream. I may have to try that!

[shadowspar]

Yeah, whipped cream is definitely the default -- something we'd never been known about while growing up, so it was disconcerting to find out most people thought "strawberries and cream" to be something very different to what we knew. =)