In which meringue shells are not to be found for love nor money

[carbonel]

Tomorrow, I'm having some friends over for cards and a light collation. Here is the current planned menu, which is also serving as a reminder for me not to forget any of these.

Savories
Quesadillas
Cucumber sandwiches
Radish sandwiches (I may only make one of these two)
Potato chips
Onion dip
Terra chips
(I also bought a packet of Bugles totally on impulse, but I think three chiplike items is one too many. Possibly two too many, actually.)

Sweets
Brownies (already made; need to be defrosted)
Palmiers
Watermelon
Eton mess

It's that last one that led to my fruitless (as it were) quest. An Eton mess is a classic British summertime dessert consisting of slightly sweetened whipped cream mixed with macerated strawberries and broken bits of meringue shells, topped with more strawberry. Variations can include many different fruits, of course. But all of the recipes I looked at online called for commercial meringue shells to be broken up.

The Target grocery (my usual one) doesn't carry meringue shells -- no surprise there. Cub (big box grocery chain) also doesn't carry meringue shells, or even meringue cookies, though it does carry meringue powder. Since that was around $6, and I already had eggs and sugar, I didn't choose that route. The one that really surprised me is that Kowalski's also doesn't carry meringue shells. I didn't try Trader Joe's because that was too far away to drive to for just one item. Luckily, the recipe from the Telegraph also included an added recipe for making your own meringue -- though I've been making chocolate chip meringue cookies for years, and would have coped just fine on my own.

I wonder if meringue shells are a standard item in British grocery stores. They certainly aren't in my local options for groceries, though I know I've seen them from time to time.

As long as I'm musing about things culinary, I have a question about strawberries. Does anyone else cut out the white core bit from their strawberries when they're cleaning them? My mother never did; she just slice off the tops. But I don't like the texture, so after I slice off the tops, I cut it out as part of the cleaning process. Am I the weird one, or is she? (I can't attribute it to laziness on my mother's part; for years, she cut off the little thorny spikes on asparagus, until we persuaded her that once you cook them, they pretty much disappear. Strawberry cores are much easier to deal with.)

Comments

[pameladean]

If I am doing a fancy strawberry thing I take out the cores; they don't have a pleasant texture and they can be a bit bitter. If I am just eating strawberries I just eat the cores too.

P.

[carbonel]

I just talked to my mother on the phone, and asked her about her strawberry-coring habits. She said (as I already knew) that she never bothered, but she has friends who do -- and that they are prettier that way. And -- of course -- that there's a tool for doing so.

[pameladean]

As you say, of course there is. Huh. I wonder if I'd do more with strawberries if I had the tool.

Probably not. I don't usually buy regular commercial strawberries, and organically raised ones are very pricy. I grew my own once, but it was impossible to get any ripe berries before the squirrels and rabbits did. Well, I could have swathed the plants in netting, but I'm not very good at doing things like that and everything tends to just fall down.

P.

[bibliofile]

The tool that the strawberry farm sells (because I live in a small city in the middle of farm country) for fifty cents has a round bottom that will scrape out the greenery plus at least a small portion of the white stuff, depending on how hard you press down. It looks like this.