Strawberry Lemonade Pie

It's H O T in the South y'all. I'm talking Spring completely skipped right over us. And if we weren't already a glutton for punishment, we went to the strawberry patch to pick us a batch of strawberries earlier this week. I'm not sure I even made it to the passenger side of the vehicle to get the girls out before I was doing some major glistening sweatin'. But our sweet friends asked us to go and we were excited because this would be our first time pickin' strawberries.

The patch we went to was about a forty-five minute drive from our house. It didn't take us long to pick our buckets full. We were worried they wouldn't have many left — wrong! They had so many ripe strawberries that we didn't even go all the way down our two rows before filling up four buckets.

 
Avery kept telling me on the way to the field that she couldn't wait to make a strawberry cake. And seeing as how I've never made anything with strawberries in it, I had no clue how many strawberries it would take. Needless to say, four buckets = strawberries running out our ears. So we have been sharing a couple of buckets with our neighbors and friends since I found out most recipes only call for a cup or less. Whoops!

Did I mention that it's H O T? And I'm not about to turn that oven on to make it even hotter in here. (Y'all I'm sure our sweet neighbor is reading this and laughing. She knows to wear a sweater to our house because I like it freezing in here!) Since I didn't want to turn the oven on I got to thinking about a good way we could use the strawberries. Smoothies. Yes. But Avery really wanted to "bake" something. So I thought about the very first recipe my mom taught me — Lemon Ice Box Pie. It's the first thing she let me make on my own to carry to church and other functions when I was in high school. I thought incorporating the strawberries in that recipe might be a fun idea. And, well, it was perfect!

Ingredients:
1/4 cup of lemon juice
1 1/2 cups of pureed strawberries
1 14 oz. of sweetened condensed milk
1 8 oz. tub of cool whip (thawed)
1 graham cracker ready crust


Directions:
Combine lemon juice, strawberry puree and sweetened condensed milk and whisk together until blended. Add the entire tub of cool whip folding it in with the previous ingredients. Pour into the graham cracker crust and let it set in the fridge for three to four hours. When serving, garish with more strawberry puree and/or lemon zest.

This is the perfect cool treat for these crazy summer days!