Wish I Had Known This Sooner

"Are you kidding me? We've let another thing of strawberries go bad!" This was my husbands cry from inside the refrigerator yesterday afternoon. We had purchased the strawberries on Sunday, and alas this was the next Saturday, but still you would think they would last longer. Nope! There they were all tasty and moldy and in the bottom of our trashcan. $4.00 down the drain, and in these uncertain economic times that is not good!

Luckily, just in time, or in this case a day too late my mother sent me this e-mail:

The key to preventing moldy berries... Berries are delicious, but they're also kind of delicate. Raspberries in particular seem like they can mold before you even get them home from the market. There's nothing more tragic than paying $4 for a pint of local raspberries, only to look in the fridge the next day and find that fuzzy mold growing on their insides. Well, with fresh berries just starting to hit farmers markets, we can tell you how to keep them fresh! Here’s a tip I’m sharing on how to prevent them from getting moldy in the first place: Wash them with vinegar. When you get your berries home, prepare a mixture of one part vinegar (white or apple cider probably work best) and ten parts water. Dump the berries into the mixture and swirl around. Drain, rinse if you want (though the mixture is so diluted you can't taste the vinegar,) and pop in the fridge. The vinegar kills any mold spores and other bacteria that might be on the surface of the fruit, and voila! Raspberries will last a week or more, and strawberries go almost two weeks without getting moldy and soft. So go forth and stock up on those pricey little gems, knowing they'll stay fresh as long as it takes you to eat them.

So I followed these instruction this afternoon when we got home from the Wal-mart, and we shall see. If anything, it definitely got them cleaner than I normally get them. Wish I had known this sooner!