I’m thrilled to have my dear friend Tiffany from Don’t Waste the Crumbs join us to share her tips and encouragement on how we can teach our kids about where real food really comes from.

By taking a family field trip to a beautiful u-pick farm, Tiffany documents how easy and FUN it is to teach your children about real food!

And she’s also sharing more than 20 delicious and nutritious ways to enjoy fresh, ripe summer strawberries! YUM!

P.S. Incase you missed her inspiring post “A Real Food Journey: Small Steps in the Right Direction,” I highly encourage you to take a minute to read it and learn how small steps forward really do lead to healthy changes that last a lifetime.

Learning Where Real Food Comes From …

by Tiffany, Don’t Waste the Crumbs

As a mother who also happens to be a real food blogger, it should be a given that my kids know what real food is, and where it comes from.

That’s why I feel like cringing when one of my kids pipes up with “we can just get more from the store,” if we happen run out of something. Yikes!

Thankfully, I had a hands-on opportunity last week to teach them where food really comes from – God’s beautiful and bountiful earth.

We traveled to a local u-pick farm where the kids were able to walk through row after row of beautiful strawberry plants – giving us all the opportunity to observe the berries in their various stages of development and better understand the connection between these fields and our kitchen table.

As we journeyed, plants overflowing with strawberries surrounded us on both sides. The kids quickly learned how green and pink berries aren’t yet ready to be picked, but to look for the big, “red red red” strawberries instead. With each step, they excitedly found more and more ripe strawberries and with a little bit of muscle, were able to pick them off of the plants themselves. Their red stained faces were evidence that a few strawberries were “accidentally” eaten, yet their buckets were still nearly full before we even made it to the end of the first row!

Conversations in the field were easy – they already knew that God made the earth and everything in it. But this trip helped them to understand that God causes food to grow from the ground, that people have to use their hands and work to get cultivate and pick it – all so we can eat it and nourish our bodies.

When our buckets were full, we took them to be weighed. Between three adults and two kids, we managed to pick just under 11 pounds of strawberries!

We brought our bounty home and our real food education continued … the kids helped me wash the berries using homemade natural produce wash and we talked about how nutritious strawberries are and what kinds of ways we might enjoy them.

The kids had permission to eat as many as they wanted, yet even with their little hands continuously reaching into the bowl (and mommy continuously refilling it), the flat of berries still looked to be completely untouched!

It was clear that if we were ever going make a dent in the 11 pounds of fresh strawberries we brought home, I would need to get serious about gathering a lot more healthy and delicious strawberry recipes (and I would also need to get serious about Freezing, Blending and Dehydrating them too)!

After talking to a few of my favorite real foodie friends, I’ve put together a plethora of strawberry recipes – more than enough to cover our bountiful pickings AND yours too!

20+ Strawberry Recipes Your Whole Family Will Love!

Delicious real food recipes perfect for using with fresh ripe strawberries:
• Strawberry Shortcakes (GF)
• Strawberry Shortcake Muffins (GF)
• Strawberry Pancakes
• Sourdough Pancakes
• Strawberry Summer Cake
• Strawberry Feta Salad (GF)
• Strawberry Key Lime Cheesecake
• Strawberry Shortcake Pie (GF)
• Very Berry Pie
• Fabulous Fruit Pizza (GF)
• Roasted Strawberry and Goat Cheese Ice Cream (GF)
• Strawberries and Chocolate Sauce (GF)

Wholesome recipes perfect for using overripe strawberries:
• Strawberry Apple Fruit Butter (GF)
• Strawberry Lemonade Slushy (GF)
• Smoothies (GF)
• Strawberry Cacao Milkshake (GF)
• Crock Pot Sugar Free Strawberry Chia Jam (GF)
• Jumbleberry Jam (GF)
• No Cook Strawberry Freezer Jam (GF)
• Strawberry Maple Jam (GF)
• Strawberry Cream Pops (GF)
• Wholesome All-Fruit Pops (GF, DF)
• Strawberry Topping (GF) for Cheesecake, Ice Cream, Pancakes & more! 

There are so many ways you can teach your children about real food – from something as simple as visiting a local farmers market, to getting hands-on and planting a garden together or visiting a local u-pick farm.

In the mood to pick real food?

Start here to find a u-pick farm in your area. Be sure to call ahead for availability, and don’t be afraid to ask the farms for recommendations of other u-pick sites too, if one close you isn’t listed. Our local farm gave us a huge map of all the u-pick farms in our area – many more than we were able to find online and this enabled us to find a few more farms to visit that are closer to home!

P.S. Visiting a u-pick farm is not only a great way to teach your kids about where real food comes from, but it’s also a great way to save money too. This field trip taught us that by doing the work ourselves and eliminating the cost of packaging, handling and shipping we were able to enjoy far more fresh produce for far less. At left are the same strawberries, picked by the local farm, for sale in their local shop. As you can see, by picking the berries ourselves and bypassing the packaging, we saved over $17. The cost of the kids learning where our food comes from?  Priceless.

Meet Tiffany!
Tiffany is a newbie real foodie who is trying to master real foods and incorporate them into her kitchen without breaking the bank. She documents her baby-sized strides at Don’t Waste the Crumbs and Google.