Strawberry Sauce for Cheesecakes, Ice Cream Toppings, and Other Sweet Treats

Ingredients:
-2 packs of strawberries
-1.5 C sugar
-1/4 C water (can be on the scant side)
-Juice of half a lemon
-5 shakes of ginger
-Optional corn starch if needed for thickening

Dice up the strawberries (or process them if you don't want very many chunks) and pop them in a medium sized pan or larger with all the rest of the ingredients except the corn starch.

I heated mine on just under medium and from the beginning alternated between stirring and mashing with a potato masher.  I wanted to leave some chunks but I also wanted to get those juices pumping out of the berries.

Heat and heat and heat some more, I let mine go for about ten minutes.  If I stopped stirring for just a moment, bubbles would form as it was pretty close to boiling, to give you an idea of medium on my stove.  Mine is gas, and it functions a lot different than the electric at my mom's house.  There always seems to be a level of adjustment between equipment.

Anyway, there are two things to remember here.  Jelly and sauces and all other such shenanigans firm up a lot after being refrigerated.  That being said, I still added about 1/2 TB of corn starch, which I dissolved in roughly 1/4th cup of water and then added to my strawberry mix, stirring constantly.  I followed the directions and let the liquid come to a boil and boil for one minute.  And then I did my own directions and let it boil another minute.

Because I am a rebel.

Or maybe just because I was paranoid of not having it be the right consistency.

Remove it from the heat and transfer to a bowl to cool before placing it in your fridge over night.  I set a fan on mine because I really needed to speed up the process.  We were having some wicked wind here and I was not in the mood to pay much attention to the sweets I was making any longer.

I served mine with some cheesecake bites that I will be posting about tomorrow, and it was all a big hit.  I think this strawberry sauce would be fantastic with ice cream, waffles, as a dessert "salsa" with cinnamon chips, and quite a few other things.  It was definitely great with cheesecake.

It was also great directly off the spoon...

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