Strawberry Overload

It's official....I am sick of strawberries. I put up 15 pints of strawberry jam, froze 2 quarts of berries for margaritas in January, and have eaten my fill of strawberry shortcake. My final strawberry act this season was to make strawberry liqueur. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I made raspberry liqueur for holiday gifts, and it went over so well I am going to make lots more fruit liqueurs this summer. This recipe is adapted from Cordials from Your Kitchen by Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling.

Strawberry Liqueur
2 quarts, or about 3 wine bottles

6 cups fresh hulled
3 cups sugar
4 cups of the cheapest vodka you can find
2 cups water
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 orange
Juice of one lemon

Crush berries and sugar in a bowl and let them macerate for about an hour. In a gallon sized container that has a lid (I have a big glass jar that I make picked eggs in that has a cork lid that I use for this) add berries and remaining ingredients. Cover and let stand in a cook, dark place, for 2 days, shaking the container at least once a day. Use a fine mesh strainer to strain out the solids and discard them. Rinse out your gallon container and put the liqueur back in it and let it stand for a week. Then you have to filter the liqueur, read this post I found for a veritable epistle on all the ways you can filter liqueurs. I rack filtered mine, which is fancy talk for using a hose like you would use to drain an aquarium to clean it. Put the final product in some pretty wine bottles, or whatever other bottles you might have like canning jars, liquor bottles, whatever catches your eye. I used old wine corks to close my bottles - I closed them lightly in case there was any gasses that might be generated, but there didn't seem to be any. Let it age in the bottle for at least a month.