Archive for Wild Food

02 Aug 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • Garden • locavore log • vegetable • Wild Food

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

A few weeks ago, I blogged about picking up berries in the hedge rows – free wild food… well.. free as in “spend no cash”, but after several hours in the delightful mugginess and bugginess characteristic of a Virginia summer, the numerous scratches that you have collected – not matter how careful or layered you were – and the (relatively) meager harvest, you understand why berries seem so expensive when you buy them. And those are the cultivated ones that grow meekly and obediently in rows and trellises. Wild berries are … well… wild in how they grow – and you do have to keep an eye out for snakes and bears. It’s always amazing the things some people will do for wild berries!

So I froze berries by the bag full and jubilantly made wild blackberry sorbet & wineberry sorbet.

Then I read about Sugar High Friday on FoodBlogga where bloggers and non-bloggers alike are invited to make a dessert featuring berries and send it to the organizer. The round-up is the brain child of Jennifer at the Domestic Goddess. I am very new to the blogosphere – having had high speed internet only very recently and just discovering all those neat food blogs out there. I am still struggling with a lot of the technical blog stuff, but I can cook (or so I’d like to think). While dessert is not necessarily my forte, I’ve got berries: besides the aforementioned wild blackberries and wineberries, the garden is currently producing a few late blueberries, day-neutral strawberries, the odd raspberries and alpine strawberries (neither of which by the way is a berry, botanically speaking; but that will be a post for another time). Mmm… I hope Jennifer meant “Berries” as cooks and gardeners would mean it – not as botanists…

[Update August 4, 2008: Stop by FoodBlogga where Susan posted today pictures and links to 82 desserts all featuring berries, some very simple and some quite elaborate - but all looking simply delicious.]

Anyway, why not try to make a dessert, a COOL dessert – as it’s way too hot to do any real baking around here – that I could send in? A dessert good enough for a festive occasion but simple enough to assemble on any week night – as all the components – except for the fresh berries – can be made days (or even weeks) in advance. It’ll give me a topic for a post and will make my friend Margaret happy since she asked me to post a sorbet recipe using berries. Voila! I love it when I can accomplish several things at once! (Margaret: do note, you are getting TWO new sorbet recipes, two herbal syrup recipes that may be used in ice-teas and cocktails AND the dessert is fat free if you omit the toasted almonds and the whipped cream)

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

And so Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee was born.(It did not stay alive very long: hands kept trying to grab it as as was trying to take “one more picture”… and if you can pronounce the name 3 times very fast, you get to eat the jubilee). Read more

sylvie | 4 comments
23 Jul 2008
fruit • Harvest • locavore log • Wild Food

Food from the Hedgerow

Wineberries ripening

It rained all through last night and today – something we haven’t had in a long time. The creek which had become so low I could not hear it from the house (but unlike last year, it has not dried out completely – at least not yet) is singing again. So of course, I did not weed the upper vegetable garden which already was a jungle (I know that when I am able to get to it, I will need a machete). Instead of weeding, I did paperwork and admin stuff and data entry and writing and all those other things that kept me indoor.

Still… I was keeping out an appreciative ear for the rain on the metal roof. Such a nice rain too, slow with an occasional shower and no wind. Oh how is the garden liking this! (me too, at least right then, no need to water). All of that to say that by mid-afternoon I was getting pretty restless. Yeah, I know all that other stuff needs to be done, especially when one is running a small business and trying to keep things under control. Nonetheless, I was getting restless. So when the weather let up for a while, I went wild berry picking. Since I was going to freeze them and cook them right away, it did not matter that they were wet from the rain.

Wild berry picking is a little expedition.

First, you get the berry baskets: they are not too big (about a quart) because you don’t want the bottom berries to get all squashed and 4 of them fit within a much bigger basket with a large comfortable handle.

Then you get the picking basket, which has no “proper” handle but two ear-like small handles that you use to loop the basket on your belt, leaving both your hands free. Even better, if you put your belt on loose enough, the basket nestles against your tummy giving you extra protection from thorny branches in front as you push – or attempt to push – your way through the brambles, and does not spill out even as you bend down. Trust me, it’s pretty bad to spill your basket of berries after you spent a sweaty and thorny hour picking it.

And you want to dress appropriately. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: , , , ,
17 Jul 2008
beverage • Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • locavore log • Wild Food

Ruby Lemonade

A glass of blackberry lemonadeI don’t like to throw out (I mean compost) food – even things that other people may not see as still edible.

I went wild berry picking earlier in the week (that’ll make a post fo another day) and decided to make a sorbet with some of the wild blackberries I picked. (By the way, if you ever wonder why berries seem so expensive, go pick some, and you’ll get a much better understanding of that price…)

The wild blackberries have a lot of seeds, so I strain the puree before mixing it with my syrup. But although I tried to squeeze as much pulp as I could (getting purple hands and a new color pattern on my apron in the process) there was still too much pulp left for me to throw those seeds in the compost without a vague guilt feeling.

I had lemons left. We had Spirited Lemonade over the week-end as well as marinated lemon chicken. Sooo… How about blackberry lemonade?

I put water in a bowl, drop the whole seed mass in there, swish them around, strained again, and voila! blackberry wash! Then I squeezed a few lemons, use the blackberry wash instead of water, sugar to taste (not too much: maybe 2 tablespoon for the quart I was making, as I prefer my lemonade tart), and we had a beautifully ruby-colored lemonade, tasting of both lemon and wild blackberries.

Locavore log: blackberries from the hedgerow

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , , , , ,
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