Sunday, July 13, 2008

Strawberry Explosion


Strawberries must be my absolute favorite fruit! I love just about anything that has strawberries in it or that is strawberry-flavored!

Recently, Mom Central teamed up with the California Strawberry Commission to spread the word about all the wonderful benefits of strawberries, plus fun strawberry facts to share with your kids, and fun interactive games to play on the Web at Strawberryville.com.

Did you know that California growers pick about 6 million crates of strawberries each week to ship to grocery stores nationwide? So, what do we do with these wonderful strawberries?

Take advantage of the hundreds of strawberry recipes that can be found here. Whether you enjoy strawberry shortcake, strawberry drinks, desserts, or strawberry salads (my favorite is the strawberry chicken salad), the California Strawberry Commission has hundreds of recipes absolutely free for you and your family to enjoy.

Not only are strawberries the most delicious fruit out there (in my opinion), but they also have numerous health benefits. Here are just a few things that moms should know:

• Strawberries contain powerful antioxidants.
• One serving of strawberries contains more vitamin C than one orange.
• Strawberries help fight some types of cancer, lower blood pressure, and reduce the risk of heart disease.
• Strawberries aid in memory function, and help prevent Alzheimer’s.
• Strawberries decrease stress and inflammation.

If your kids are picky eaters (like mine), you can find a way to serve them strawberries by trying one of the many recipes found on CSC’s Web site. In addition, they also have a lot of fun strawberry facts to share with your kids. Increasing their knowledge of strawberries will make eating them more fun!

Here are a few fun facts to share:

• If you lined up all of the strawberries grown in California in one straight line, they would wrap around the Earth 15 times.
• There are about 200 seeds on the outside of each strawberry.
• California harvests over a billion pounds of strawberries each year.
• One acre of land (about the size of one football field) grows about 50,000 pounds of strawberries - that's the same weight as 4 elephants!

Visit http://www.strawberryville.com/ today for more fun facts and fun strawberry games. For more information and recipes, visit http://www.calstrawberry.com/.

1 comment:

Crazy Working Mom said...

Wow, very interesting facts! Cool to know.