Proctor Hill Berries

The place I used to go horseback riding is called Proctor Hill. I was given permission to forage there; there were nettles but, mostly, there were berries. All sorts of berries. Over the years, I foraged wee little amounts of black raspberries, red raspberries, wild blueberries, a handful of blackberries, and wild grapes. These were tucked into the freezer, waiting until I had enough of them. I had always intended to make a mixed berry jam or jelly as a gift for my riding instructor. 

Time has marched on and my instructor has left that farm for a place that better suited her current needs. I haven't ridden for over a year, after a spectacular fall made me question whether I wanted to continue. I was just getting ready to consider Western pleasure riding instead when the pandemic effectively made the decision for me. At least, for now. I do miss it; spending an hour or so a week without a cell phone in sight, only focused upon the immediate challenge of convincing a very large living and opinionated creature to do what I wanted. It got me out of my head in a way that nothing else seems to do. 

In the process of moving out and then back in to a freezer, I found all those berries. It was clear I was never going to add to the stash so it was time to make jelly out of what I had. The grapes are the dominant flavor but the raspberries do add something, I think. I cooked down the berries with water, extracted almost six cups of juice, let the solids settle, and then made jelly. Ultimately I ended up with about nine cups of jelly, enough for 12 small jars for my gift stash and a few extra just for us.

Slightly Past Their Prime

In today's farm share there were unlimited blackberries. That's a cause for celebration because I can get enough to make jam! However, it's late enough in the season that the really large and beautiful berries were starting to get soft and even ferment a little. You could smell them before you even got to the bushes. Nevertheless, I picked three quarts.

Once home, as I washed them I picked out the mushiest berries, the ones that basically disintegrated under the running water. The rest went into the pot with a packet of sure-jell pectin. I added 2 T. of lemon juice as a way to offset the overly sweet and slightly fermented berries; the boiling process seems to have gotten rid of the rest of the alcohol taste. After adding in 6.5 cups of sugar and finishing the cooking, I had 11 cups of jam. Two will be set aside for the fair and a few will go to my friend as her part of this week's blackberry distribution.

I have a few more plans with the accumulated produce from last week and this one; I will make salsa verde and also try my hand at a fermented hot pepper sauce. More on those later when I have time. 

Peaches, From My Very Own Tree

This is my peach tree.

Yes, that's right. The thing hanging over the wall.

Astute observers will notice that it has a problem. It's growing horizontally instead of vertically. Clearly it doesn't have long for this world, but I'm hanging on to it to get my one and only peach harvest from it. I planted it 2 years ago. Last year there was a late frost that killed all the buds. This year it came back with a vengeance, so much so that the weight of the peaches pulled the tree over, breaking the root base and basically endangering passers-by. But there are peaches on it! About a half-bushel's worth and, today, I made my first batch of jam with them.

There is netting over the tree to keep out the birds, but it doesn't keep out the chipmunks, who eat half a peach and then run away. I pick what I can that are just starting to yield a bit to pressure and let them ripen in a bag on the counter. So far, I've gotten about 4 pounds.

Today's jam was inspired by the beautiful blackberries in yesterday's farm share. I decided to make a Blackberry Peach Jam:  1 pint of blackberries, 3 cups chopped peaches, 2 T. lemon juice, 1 box powdered pectin, and 6.5 cups of sugar. The blackberries were crushed as they cooked a bit. This made 8.5 pints of jam. I might enter some in the fair. Or not. One pint will go to my friend with whom I'm splitting the share, since she didn't get any blackberries this week because she was out of town.

More Vegetables

With yesterday's farm share pick up, my vegetable drawer is rather full. Since we just can't eat that much, it's time to start making things with the veggies. First up, a batch of caponata. For this I had 2 eggplants, so I scaled the recipe up by 1/3 and used 4 peppers (instead of celery), 4 small onions, 4 tomatoes, and the last of my Kalamata olives. I didn't have any green olives for this batch. This made 3-1/2 pints of caponata and I'll take one jar to my parents' tonight.

The next thing was another 2 quarts of green beans, which are currently in the canner in 4 pint jars becoming "Zydeco Green Beans." Essentially, they are dilly beans without the dill. Instead, there is garlic, mustard seed, and a chili pepper in each jar.

The farm share is a bit out of control: 1 spaghetti squash, 1 pound of carrots, 1 bunch of beets, 1 head of lettuce, 1 bowl of arugula, 3 heads of garlic, 4 onions, 8 peppers, 2 quarts of green beans, 1 bunch parsley, 2 quarts blackberries, 1 quart peaches, 2.5 pounds of summer squash, 30 leaves of kale, 1 quart cherry tomatoes, 2 pounds of regular tomatoes, 8 tomatillos, and I didn't even get the flowers, husk cherries, basil and seasonal herbs. As soon as I got home I made a salad for dinner, used some of the tomatoes and onion in our enchiladas, and baked a peach and blackberry crisp. Which was dessert and breakfast. The berries had been too squishy to eat straight so I needed to bake with them. I contemplated a peach-blackberry jam but the crisp seemed a better option.

I've been keeping an eye on the bees, and have made a pint of "Bee Food" concentrate: sugar, water, lecithin, lemongrass oil and spearmint oil. This is added to the sugar syrup, 1 tsp. per quart. When I replace the quart jar tomorrow afternoon, that will be the first time they get it, hopefully they will like it. It's supposed to give them some essential nutrients.

Promised Pie and a Whole Lot of Veggies

As I said last week, I owed my kids a pie.  Today I made a peach pie using 10 small peaches.  The crust was mostly Crisco with a little butter.  The berries came from the farm share and I thought they would make a nice garnish.  I must have been on to something because the 9 year old exclaimed, "Holy smokes!  It looks like something they serve at a fancy restaurant!"  Wow!

The farm share today was HUGE.  I had to carry it in 4 tote bags:  potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes (LOTS of tomatoes), cherry tomatoes, kohlrabi, eggplant, peppers, hot peppers, parsley, dill, cilantro, tomatillos, blackberries, green beans, kale, turnips, spaghetti squash, watermelon, and then there were the things I skipped this week (flowers, husk cherries, other herbs).  After I got all this home and we were eating some of it for dinner, our mason arrived with more tomatoes, eggplant, celery, parsley, long green beans and Bishop Crown peppers.  I have a lot to do!

Tonight I made a batch of that hot pepper sauce I made last year.  I had 22 banana peppers which was about half a batch.  This is mixed with yellow mustard, vinegar, sugar and salt and then thickened with flour.  After that it is processed for 20 minutes in a boiling water canner.  This amount of peppers made 10.5 cups of hot sauce.

Camping is Best in Berry Season

While it's a little late in the season for some most berries, once we arrived at our campsite 2 days ago and set up the tents, we walked around to do some foraging.  Well, I walked.  The kids biked.  We went to the various sites I remembered that had berries with some luck.  I found one blueberry, very few partridge berries, lots of bunchberries, no wintergreen, but mostly blackberries.  We picked what looked good, got back to the campsite and had a little afternoon snack of foraged berries with sugar and cream. 

Forageberry Crisp

Today we returned from our annual camping trip and, this time, I was armed with a very handy book!  It was a gift from Lisa, and I used it to identify some berries I didn't really recognize.  When we arrived and found our campsite was full of blackberries, I hit upon an idea.  I would collect every type of edible berry I could find and make a crisp or cobbler out of them when we got home.

Mostly I found blackberries.  Wild, small, tart blackberries.  I also found similar berries on a ground cover bramble - a different type of blackberry, it seems.  And I found Juneberries, blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries, partridge berries, and a single teaberry.  (It's a little early in the season for the teaberries (aka wintergreen), after all.)  I also ate a couple of bunchberries but, like the partridge berries, they were tasteless so I decided to leave them out of the final baking.

Once I got everything home I washed and sorted and got rid of any that had gotten squishy over the weekend.  Then I put them in a little 7 x 4 pyrex dish and made a wee little crisp.  It was pretty seedy but tasty!
 

Foraged in Stages

As I think I've previously mentioned, this has been an excellent year for berries in our area.  Everywhere I go, I find some sort of berry or other.  So far it's been blueberries, elderberries, and blackberries, with a few raspberries thrown in for good measure.  It is much more fun to go on a walk when one can stop and eat a few berries!

However I have also wanted to make blackberry jam.  But I never get enough at one place to make that possible.  So I have been going on lots of walks, carrying ziploc bags or little berry baskets, and getting a few here, a few there.  I have lots of blackberry areas staked out, and would give more berries time to ripen and go back.  It's paid off; I accumulated and froze 2 quarts of berries and, yesterday, got about 1 cup more.  Time to make jam.

I pulled out the food mill this morning and ran everything through.  The yield was 5 cups of seedless blackberry puree, just enough for a batch of jam with the powdered pectin.  Somehow it made 9 cups of jam, which was a surprise, as the recipe indicated I'd only get 7.  Whatever!  The 8 year old, who helped get a lot of the berries, got to lick the pot for breakfast.  How great is that?

The 8 year old and I also got 3 pounds of elderberries while we were out yesterday, from that same wonderful shrub I'd found before.  More were ripe this time, so it was easier.  Yesterday I smushed them with an immersion blender and ran them through a jelly bag, getting 1 quart of juice.  Today I mixed that quart with 4 cups of sugar and made syrup.  I ended up with exactly 3 pints, divvied up into 12-ounce and 8-ounce jars.  I used Hank Shaw's recipe - he has terrific recipes for foraged foods.  (As an aside, I'm hoping to go to his book tour stop in our area this fall.)

Two foraged canning projects in one day!  Crazy!

Experiments

There are a lot of really great blogs out there, with some incredible recipes.  I was inspired by Hunter Angler Gardener Cook to make a panna cotta and fruit compote for it.  I was also interested in trying to recreate a coconut milk based seafood stew I had in a restaurant, and found this recipe, which I altered slightly and came up with a really terrific dinner.  Here's what I did:

For the panna cotta, I made half the recipe since I only had four ramekins.  This set up in the fridge while I prepped for dinner.  [2 cups heavy cream, 1/4 cup sugar, heated in the microwave until very warm.  Add 1 tsp. vanilla.  Mix 1 packet unflavored gelatin with 3 T. cold water, pour the hot cream over it and stir.  Chill in oiled ramekins for at least 2 hours.]  The compote was blackberries and blueberries mixed with 4 T. lime juice, 1/3 cup of sugar, and simmered for 15 minutes (based on Hank Shaw's mulberry key lime compote).  Then I added the cornstarch and cooked it 5 minutes more and let it cool.

To make the stew, I started with the chowder recipe but changed the fish and added rice noodles.  Before I ran a few errands I chopped 1 red pepper, 1 green pepper, 3 carrots, 1 onion, and some garlic, and set it aside.  I had bought half a pound each of swordfish, scallops and squid and a pound of little necks.  I cut the scallops in half, chopped the squid and swordfish and cleaned the little necks and set everything aside.  To the sauteed vegetables and spices I added 1 pint of lobster stock, 1 pint of light cream, and 1 can of coconut milk.  I did not add the tomato paste because the lobster stock had been made with a tomato base.  Once I got everything simmering, I added all the seafood except the little necks and simmered for 5 minutes.  Then I added the little necks and a package of rice noodles and simmered for 12 minutes until the little necks opened.  It tasted amazing and, because the noodles absorbed a lot of liquid, became more of a stew than a chowder.  Garnished with parsley and cilantro, it was a very filling meal.

 Getting the panna cotta out of the ramekins was a little challenging but I finally got the hang of it.  A little compote spooned around it and some garnish, and voila!  Perfection.

Garden Salad Takes on a New Meaning

A few days ago I mentioned hairy bittercress and that it was growing in my yard.  Since then I've checked back on The 3 Foragers' blog and found that I was not using it to its full potential!  Yesterday we had friends over for dinner so I tossed some into a salad of regular lettuce, cucumber, mango, tomato, and goat cheese.  It was very good, but the peppery taste of the bittercress was lost.  So today, following their example, I made an entire salad of just bittercress, plus a couple of young dandelion leaves, and goat cheese, drizzled with balsamic vinegar.  It was sharp and a little stronger than anticipated.  Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere?

For last night's dinner we also marinated 2 pounds of shrimp in a cup of the Mango Blackberry BBQ sauce and grilled them.  The shrimp were excellent!

Blackberry Brambles

This afternoon I went to my brother's house and picked blackberries.  I might be the only one crazy enough to climb into the blackberry bushes to get to the berries in the back.  There is probably a good reason for this.  My arms look like I tried to pick up a stray cat.  A really angry, antisocial stray cat.

Regardless of how much blood was shed, Stephanie and I netted almost a quart of blackberries.  I brought them home to make jam for us and was saddened to learn I needed 2 quarts for a batch of jam.  I did have a pint of mulberries in the freezer so I added those.  I then tried to stem the mulberries, and one thing led to another and I found myself pushing a blackberry/mulberry puree I'd made in the Cuisinart through my fine mesh strainer to remove the seeds.  To this I added 6.5 cups of sugar and a pouch of Certo and now have 5.5 cups of seedless jam.  Which is very gelled.  Yes, the proportions were off.  But that's OK - it doesn't appear to be fruit leather so it's better than some of the other concoctions...

Inspiration!

Remember back in August when I picked all the blackberries I could find in my brother's backyard? And how I froze a quart of them, waiting for the opportunity to make barbecue sauce? Well, I just couldn't seem to find the right recipe for what I had in mind. So I waited. And I bought mangoes. And I waited. And, wait... mangoes?

Hmmm.

In the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving is a recipe for Zesty Peach BBQ Sauce. I've made it before. It was divine. I don't know why I didn't think of this before but, mango-blackberry BBQ sauce it is!

After thawing the blackberries just a little, I ran them through the blender and ended up with almost 3 cups of coarse puree. To this I added enough chopped mango to make a total of 6 cups of fruit. The rest of the recipe is the same (page 263). It's merrily bubbling away on the stove, thickening up until it's the right consistency and then I will process it. Last year's batch made only 5 jars, so I suspect I won't get much more than that this time. Preliminary taste tests indicate a success!

Going Too Far? Nah!

Gleefully I crowed to my sister about picking 2 quarts of wild blackberries in our brother's backyard yesterday. She said, "You realize you're crazy, right? I've never seen anyone get so excited about foraging."

I just can't help myself! Even if I did have to arm myself with gardening gloves, hiking boots, and long pants just so I wouldn't get so many scratches. I mean, I was IN those bushes. I did, at one point, get stuck under a very large and spiky cane and required my sister-in-law's assistance to get out. At which point, I'm quite sure, SHE decided I was crazy, too.

Today's batch is wild blackberry. I even ran 1 quart of the berries through a sieve to get out some of the seeds. It smells heavenly. I decided not to add the sage; I'd been debating this all week, but finally "simple" won. Using the basic recipe in the Certo package, I ended up with 8.5 cups of jam. I'll keep 4 cups and the other 4.5 will go back to my brother and sister-in-law.

And then we'll keep an eye on those Concord grapes....

Farm Share Dinner Tonight!

Today's farm share, the first one my sister-in-law and I have needed to split, consisted of: 2 heads of lettuce, 1 large bowl of tat soi, 1 head of garlic, 4 basil plants, 12 carrots, 6 really small zucchini/summer squash, 2 cucumbers, 30 fava bean pods, 1 pint each of snow peas and shell peas, 5 stems of cosmos, and herbs. I didn't pick up the herbs. So here's what I'm doing with my half:

I marinated the fava beans using this recipe and will likely eat them tomorrow. Except that instead of shallots and chives, I used garlic scapes.

Tonight's dinner is chicken nuggets, biscuits, and salad (red lettuce, cuke, shell peas, radishes from my garden, maybe some goat cheese) with an "only Mom will eat" stir fry of the squashes with garlic scapes, some carrots, and the tat soi. Right now the kids are munching on carrots and cucumber slices.

I combined the snow peas with the leftover half-pint from 2 weeks ago and will find something to do with them in the next few days.

While I was dropping of the share at my brother's house, we went outside to check out their wild blackberry and concord grape vines. The blackberries are just forming, nowhere near ripe yet, but there have to be about a thousand on the big bush. I have never seen so many in one place! And the grapes should be enough to make them some grape jelly (we haven't even made a dent in last year's batch, so I won't make more for us). This is so exciting! More gleaning! More canning!

Crazy Work Week

This has been a particularly stressful week at work - the emergency department launched a new electronic medical record system 4 days ago, going almost completely paperless in one fell swoop. And it wasn't just our pediatric emergency department, it was the entire group: 3 departments on 2 separate campuses. People have been very patient and supportive of each other, and I'm so proud of everyone for making it work.

Yesterday was the last day in which food was provided around the clock for staff. Food always makes things easier. So today I'm going in for a support shift followed by a clinical shift and I'm bringing 3 jars of jam and some stuff to serve as jam vectors: crackers, pound cake, and so on. I've selected 1 pint of blackberry jam, 1 pint of spiced plum jelly, and one half-pint of the cherry/peach/apricot jam.

Wish us luck - now that the company's support staff is no longer on site, it gets harder for a little while!

Christmas Eve

On a whim, I decided to make a pie for dessert tonight. Fresh blackberries were on special in the store, and I hit upon the idea of using a jar of raspberries in syrup for the base. So I made a pie crust. Normally I would have just bought a frozen pie crust, but I've been inspired by my own success with apple pies and with Chef Tess's pie crust recipe with the vinegar in it, so I figured I'd try it.

I don't know what went wrong, but the pie crust shrunk in the oven. I have never prebaked a pie crust for an unbaked pie before, so maybe I just did it wrong? But the pie crust ended up too thick on the bottom and about a half-inch below the edge of the pie plate; it was right at the edge when I put it into the oven. Anyone with an explanation/suggestions?

Regardless, full steam ahead! I mixed 3 T. cornstarch with 1/2 c. sugar and then added 1 c. of raspberries in syrup and 1/2 c. water and boiled this on the stove until thickened. I then added 2 drops of blue food coloring to get the dark purple color of the blackberries. Once the pie crust was cooled, I put the blackberries in the pie and poured the cooled thick filling over them. It's now in the fridge, cooling for dessert. Pictures and taste testing commentary later...

(Later) The crust is the flakiest I've ever made, and is really yummy! Even the gel held together really well. Thumbs up on the vinegar in the crust tip (thanks, Chef Tess!), but I guess I just have to work on the actual pie construction. Well, practicing is not a problem!

Every day is Jam Day

One of the advantages of having a wide variety of jams in the house is that we get to have something different every day. The other day it was toast with cream cheese and the Carrot Cake jam. Today I had toast with chive/onion cream cheese and the Cranbanero. Our 3 year old likes Nutella with Blackberry jam, while my husband prefers peanut butter with some kind of berry jam. Today it happened to be Blackberry as well. The 7 year old is not as into jam as we are and opted for cinnamon toast instead.

Blackberries

At the grocery store this morning there was a special on blackberries. In January! So I bought 10 little packages, used one for a fruit salad at lunchtime, and converted the other 9 into blackberry jam. I used the recipe on the Certo package, but I probably had way more than 4 cups of crushed berries, so I added a little extra sugar but no additional pectin.

There was a little more excitement than usual because I used a pot that was the perfect size if I'd used the right amounts of things, but with the extra berries and sugar, when I added the pectin it threatened to boil over. In fact it did boil over a little, but I managed not to get any on my skin. Contact with a substance the consistency of boiling tar is not really on my list of things to do. I held the ladle at the very end and stood as far back as possible for time it took to boil with the pectin. This photo demonstrates just how close it was!

Instead of 8 cups as promised on the Certo instruction sheet, I ended up with 11 1/2 cups. That's a good thing. Considering how fast the raspberry jam disappears, I'm sure this won't last very long!