Oh dear oh dear

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP

I got some REALLY AWESOME local strawberries from my feed mill, but I absolutely could not eat the quantity of strawberries I got before they would have gone bad and the birds are not huge fans of strawberries. So instead of wasting the last 8 or so, I jam-packed this little container with strawberries, added an equal weight of white sugar, and stuck it in the fridge for about a day and a half.

The sugar leaches the juice/water content from the strawberries and creates a saturated, thin syrup (lower sugar = thinner, more watery, higher sugar = thicker, more like maple syrup). As you can see, the container is not jam-packed with strawberries, they have considerably shrunk in size, as all their delicious, delicious juices are now trapped in a fucking fantastic fresh simple syrup.

What we do is slice the strawberries to increase their surface area, and put in layers of strawberries and sugar. We stir once or twice over the next day to make sure the sugar that sinks to the bottom is given a chance to contact the liquid, and it's done when no more sugar will dissolve in, and the strawberries are all floating near the top.

We then scoop the strawberries off the top, drain the jar into containers (freeze some), and run the sugar sediment at the bottom through a dehydrator to make strawberry sugar.