Wow! We have had a warm spring! Usually I am in the kitchen making soups, and things to keep you warm in the cold rainy weather. This year I brought out the barbeque early because it was too hot to cook in the house. For example on St. Patrick’s Day it was 89 degrees at 5 p.m., it also made me realize that everything green I owned was for cold weather.

With this warm spring the strawberries in my yard are all ready flowering … which means that maybe our local strawberry patch will be open soon (yep, it’s on Watmaugh: pronounced Whaaat-mah) Road … just a stone’s throw away from our winery.

I have been slowly but surely scanning and uploading my mother’s and grandmother’s recipes which they clipped out of magazines or wrote through their lives. One of them has strawberries! My mother always watched her sugar intake and avoided daiquiris because of the rum. Though she did save this recipe that used wine instead of the rum for a nice blended-drink on a warm day. You can use frozen strawberries if you don’t have fresh. I use fresh that I have ‘hulled’ which is taking the stem and core out of the strawberry, slice, and freeze them for a few hours or overnight. I also remember her doing it with peaches or nectarines … it’s a fun recipe … feel free to experiment! Yes, my mom was making Frozés before they became the ‘thing’ to make on a warm day.

The other recipe is my mother’s marinade for her tri-tip that we used to grill up for family barbeques. Just making this marinade and smelling it while I prepare it brings back loads of memories. This is actually a 2-for-1 recipe since I can’t have you serve the tri-tip without her tomato relish! Though even though my mother called it a tomato relish, it always looked liked a salsa to me. These can either be served with garlic bread or warm tortillas … mom always served it with one of Michael’s Pinot Noir.