By Mother's Day is next week, and the school is doing a Teacher Appreciation Week that has, through some bureaucratic alchemy, become Ruth Feldman Appreciation Week — my colleagues have conspired with the PTA to turn the entire week into a retrospective of my career, complete with a banner in the faculty lounge that says THANK YOU MRS. FELDMAN and a slideshow of photos from forty-two years of teaching that someone assembled from yearbooks and that makes me look both younger than I remember and older than I feel, which is the paradox of photographs: they tell you where you were and lie about where you are.
The students made cards. Hundreds of cards, from current students and former students who heard through the grapevine and sent them in. The cards are in a box. The box is in my car. I will bring the box home and put it with the other boxes — the forty-two years of cards, the entire archive of student appreciation, the physical evidence that Ruth Feldman stood in a classroom and mattered. The box is heavy. The heaviness is the point.
I made strawberries and cream for the faculty — fresh strawberries from the farm stand, macerated with sugar, served with whipped cream and shortbread cookies I baked on Monday. The offering was modest. The sentiment was not. I have fed these people for forty-two years — soup and cookies and hamantaschen and the specific maternal nurturing that a woman with a cooking habit brings to a workplace — and the feeding was the teaching, in a way: I taught them that food is care, that the faculty lounge is a kitchen, that the woman with the thermos of soup is not just a colleague but a keeper, a nurturer, a person who believes that fed people are better people and who has been proving it, one thermos at a time, for four decades.
The strawberries and cream I brought to the faculty lounge that week were simple on purpose — simplicity, after forty-two years, feels like the most honest thing I know. These Heavenly Filled Strawberries are the more dressed-up version of that same impulse: fresh strawberries, filled with a sweetened cream cheese mixture that turns something humble into something worthy of a celebration. When your colleagues hang a banner with your name on it and a hundred former students mail you cards, you want to give them something beautiful, something they can hold in one hand and eat in two bites, something that says I made this for you as plainly as any words could.
Heavenly Filled Strawberries
Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 20 minutes | Servings: 24 strawberries
Ingredients
- 24 large fresh strawberries
- 8 oz cream cheese, softened
- 1/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
- 1 tablespoon powdered sugar (for whipping cream)
- Graham cracker crumbs, for garnish (optional)
- Fresh mint leaves, for garnish (optional)
Instructions
- Prepare the strawberries. Wash and dry the strawberries thoroughly. Cut a thin slice off the bottom of each berry so they stand upright. Using a small paring knife or melon baller, hollow out the tops of the strawberries, creating a small cavity for the filling. Set aside on a serving platter.
- Make the cream cheese filling. Beat the softened cream cheese, 1/4 cup powdered sugar, and vanilla extract together with a hand mixer until smooth and fluffy, about 2 minutes.
- Whip the cream. In a separate chilled bowl, whip the heavy cream and remaining 1 tablespoon powdered sugar together until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture until fully combined and light.
- Fill the strawberries. Transfer the filling to a piping bag fitted with a star tip (or use a zip-top bag with a corner snipped off). Pipe the filling generously into each hollowed strawberry.
- Garnish and serve. If desired, dust lightly with graham cracker crumbs and top each with a small mint leaf. Serve immediately or refrigerate for up to 2 hours before serving.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 68 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 5g | Carbs: 4g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 40mg