by Sara Barry | Aug 2, 2014 | cooking, kids in the kitchen, summer
I grew up with wild blueberries in our yard and the woods behind it. For years, though I’ve picked large, cultivate berries at PYO places. I love those too, but the tiny, flavorful wild berries still had a place in my heart. Now they have a place in my freezer too, thanks to the Benson Place.
I went last year for the first time, turning off Route 2 into an upward maze of paved and dirt roads. As we were led to our picking spot, I thought, “It’s Blueberries for Sal.” The hilltop landscape covered with the low scrubby bushes certainly fit, but instead of tin pails we had wooden boxes, and instead of picking by hand, we used rakes to comb through the bushes and collect the berries.
This year, the bushes were heavily laden and we quickly picked two boxes (usually about 20 lbs each, but we were ambitious and piled on a few extra pounds). After picking, you bring your boxes of berries back to the sorting shed where the sorter gets out leaves, weeds, and other debris that got scooped up in your rake. The berries roll out on a conveyor belt so you can pick out any green berries, mushy berries, or stems.
My big box yielded 9 frozen quarts of berries, a batch each of raspberry-blueberry jam, blueberry jam (favorite of my dad and my big girl), and blueberry-maple sauce (for pancakes or ice cream). I’ve got quart containers set aside for more jamming, a blueberry pie, and just snacking.
This morning, I used three cups in a big batch of butterfly pancakes. Like wild blueberries, butterfly pancakes are linked to my childhood.. My mom used to make them for us. She used bacon for the antennae. I would have too, but I was out of bacon.
Butterfly Pancakes
pancake batter
blueberries
sausage
bacon or sliced fruit
- Start cooking your sausage or bacon (if using it).
- Mix up a batch of your favorite pancake batter. (I use the griddle cake recipe in the Fanny Farmer cookbook).
- Heat your griddle or skillet and skate some butter over it to grease. Pour or ladle pancake batter, keeping the pancake diameter about the size of a sausage (or a little smaller).
- When the batter is dimpled with holes, sprinkle berries across the pancake. Flip.
- Cook until the bottom is browned.
- To assemble, place a sausage in the middle of the plate. Put one pancake, blueberry side up, on either side of the sausage. Add bacon or sliced fruit for antennae.
What’s your favorite thing to do with blueberries?
by Sara Barry | Jul 30, 2014 | canning, garden, summer, writing
It’s the time of year when fruit flies are destined to take over the universe—or at least your kitchen. It’s the time of year when you keep cooking and canning and freezing trying to stay ahead of those fruit flies. It’s the time of year when your compost bucket fills up every day, more than once.
It’s the time of year when long green veggies pile up in your kitchen. You Google “zucchini recipes” and that poem by Marge Piercy. You’re not handing them out to anybody who walks by. Not quite yet.
It’s the time of year when peach juice drips down your chin and blueberries stain your fingers purple. Your arms are crisscrossed with scratches from raspberry brambles, but you don’t care.
It’s the time of year when lawn mowers rumble through dinner time and the evening insects are quieter as darkness settles. It’s the time of year when you should be cursing the heat and humidity, but tonight it feels like fall. Not yet. Not yet.
It’s the time of year when you want to sit outside and do nothing, but the garden calls and the squash and the beans and the cucumbers on the counter call. It’s the time of year when you stir pots in steamy kitchens (and love it) and wait for that tiny ping that makes you smile each time.
It’s the time of year when years ago you were waiting for your baby’s surgery, waiting to start the life you expected (almost), and you wonder now if that old anxiety is in you still. You know it’s there still in December, but in July, when you were scared but still hopeful? You don’t know. So you do what you did that year. You chop the summer fruit and cook it down and put it in jars. You did it that year because you needed something “normal” to hold on to. You do it now because it’s that time of year.
Your Turn
Write with Me:
It’s the time of year when . . . How does that sentence end for you? What are the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of this time of year? What’s happening in this season, in your life right now? Let it be loose and rough, but keep writing and see what comes up.
Share It:
Share your writing in the comments, add a link to your blog where you write about this time of year, or email me at sarabarrywrites@gmail.com. I’d love to hear this time of year is like for you.
Ready to keep writing? Try Summer Stories in 5 Minutes.
by Sara Barry | Jul 29, 2014 | cooking, summer, use what you have
My weekend canning sessions were inspired by using what we had on hand. Cucumbers weren’t part 
of the plan, nor were jalapenos, but we had lots so we canned them.
This ice cream was inspired by raspberries I picked last week. I froze three quarts of berries, but I kept some in the fridge to eat fresh. We did eat some, but the rest were sitting there getting mushy and juicy and begging to be used.
When I started making this ice cream, I remembered why I rarely make chocolate ice cream. You need to melt the chocolate and then let it cool completely before making the ice cream. It takes and extra half hour to an hour, but it’s worth it. Plan on starting about 4 hours before you want to eat ice cream (though if you eat it right out of the ice cream maker before it really “sets” it’s really good that way too). When it comes to bowl or spoon licking, I usually let me kids do a lot of the licking, but I made sure I got my fair share on this one.
Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream
(makes about 5 cups)
½ cup 1% milk + ½ cup half and half (or 1 cup whole milk)
8 oz bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped
½ cup sugar (scant)
2 cups heavy cream
½ cup mushy or mashed raspberries sprinkled lightly with sugar
- Pulse the chocolate and sugar in a food processor until chocolate is very small.
- Heat the milk and half and half in a small heavy bottomed sauce pan until it just starts to bubble at the edges.
- Remove from heat and add chocolate. Stir until chocolate melts and mixture is smooth. Pour into a 2-quart or larger mixing bowl. (An 8-cup liquid measure or a large batter bowl work well). Chill.
- Stir the heavy cream into the chocolate mixture. Pour into your ice cream maker, following instructions.
- About 5 minutes before the ice cream is done (about 25 minutes in my machine), add the raspberries. Let the machine run for 5 minutes more. Transfer the ice cream to a covered container and let set for about 2 hours.
Go make some ice cream—or at least eat some!
by Sara Barry | Jul 28, 2014 | canning, kids in the kitchen, summer, use what you have
I had an eight-hour canning extravaganza on Saturday, which felt utterly productive.
I knew I was in for dilly beans and raspberry jam and raspberry chocolate liqueur sauce, but when I showed up at my friend Kath’s house she had a colander full of cucumbers too. Always game, I asked, “Dill or bread & butter?”
Since the dill pickles we like need to sit for at least 12 hours (and I wasn’t planning on staying quite that long), we decided on bread & butter. But there were all those jalapenos. Our first batch of spicy bread & butter pickles was born.
When making these pickles, the cucumber, onion, and peppers sit in a salt brine for two hours before you cook and can them, so we started the process and then went to pick raspberries. We came in got our jars heating, had lunch, and got canning.
We had a not quite full small jar to wrap up our batch of pickles, so after it cooled a bit, we stuck it in the fridge. We usually end our canning days with ice cream, but instead we ended with pickles. They were cold and sweet and spicy all at once. We ate the whole jar standing up and agreed this was a keeper. I liked them so much, I made another batch on Sunday by myself.
In eight hours, we squeezed in
- a batch of hot bread and butter pickles
- a double batch of dilly beans
- a double batch of raspberry jam
- a double batch of raspberry chocolate liqueur sauce (so good on ice cream)*
- a single batch of raspberry-mint-lavender jam (my big girl kept suggesting raspberry mint, so we tried it).
Hot Bread & Butter Pickles
(adapted from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving)
10 cups cucumbers sliced into rounds
2 cups onion sliced (I prefer thick slices)
2 cups sliced jalapenos (we kept the seeds in)
½ cup pickling salt or Kosher salt
3 cups white vinegar
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp celery seeds
2 Tbsp mustard seeds (we use mix of yellow and brown)
2 tsp pickling spice
- Mix the pickles, onions, and peppers with salt and cover with cold water. Let sit for 2 hours.
- Prepare 6 pint jars for canning: wash jars and bands in hot soapy water, rinse, and put into a filled canning pot. This recipe should make 5 pints, but I’ve learned to always put an extra jar the same size or smaller in the canner, just in case. Put the flat lids in a heat-proof bowl. Get your canning station set up: layout a towel on the table or counter. Get your ladle, funnel, tongs, slotted spoon, and a wet paper towel or clean rag ready.
- Go pick raspberries, have lunch, read to your kids, or whatever you like until the two hours is up.
- Start heating the canning pot.
- Mix the vinegar and spices together in a large pot. Bring to a boil. While that’s heating, dump the vegetables into a colander and rinse under cold running water.
- As soon as the vinegar mixture begins to boil, add the vegetables. Again bring just to a boil. Turn off the heat.
- Remove jars from the canning pot. Ladle water from the canning pot over the flat lids.
- Spoon the veggies into the hot jars, packing fairly tightly. Ladle the vinegar brine into the jars, leaving ½ inch headspace.
Wipe the rims of the jars clean. Place a lid on each jar and screw on the band.- Put the filled jars back in the canning pot. Cover and bring the water to a boil. Once it reaches a boil process for 10 minutes (adjust for altitude if necessary).
- Then turn off the heat and removed the cover. Let jars sit for 5 minutes. Remove onto a clean towel. Wait for the delightful ping of the jars sealing. If one doesn’t seal, stick it in the fridge to enjoy now.
* If raspberry chocolate liqueur sauce sounds good, look for Sundae in a Jar in The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. We replace the strawberries with raspberries.
by Sara Barry | Jul 23, 2014 | grief, parenting, summer, writing
I used Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” as inspiration today. The last lines alone would make a good starting point:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
But, my mind caught on some of her other words, and I wrote this:
Do I know how to pay attention any more? Yesterday, I stopped, hands poised over keyboard, falling into relax, when a whirring caught my eye. A humming bird hovered and darted among my neighbors red bee balm. I could have glanced up, kept writing, kept filling the page, checking things off my list. But I sat. I watched. It’s good to look up sometimes, or down at the ants trundling through the grass, carrying crumb nearly bigger than they are. One of the activities K added to our list of things to do when bored was watch birds up in the sky. I should sit and do this with her sometimes. I should slow down on our walks, really notice, but so often I am trying to get somewhere or get some exercise or I need to be back by a certain time. What I wanted most from this summer was the laziness, the time to fall down in the grass, to pay attention.
“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” We are in a season of life and growth. I went out this morning, barefoot, to check on the garden. My feet swept through the dewy grass, so wet I could have had a long drink. I need to pull the peas. For even in this time of growing, they are done. The cosmos are almost taller than me and starting to flower. The sunflowers tower over me. The zinnias are just starting to reveal their brilliant pinks and oranges. Ah, the chard I thought wasn’t going to grow is taking off. I need to pick turnips again. I flick a few tiny seedlike eggs off the bottom of a squash leaf (squash bugs, something that doesn’t die too soon). Zucchini to pick later perhaps. Is the lettuce bin full in the fridge or should I pick some more? It too will soon be done. I should plant more.
We plant seeds knowing plants will eventually die, some after just one season. Even things we expect to live long don’t always. A neighbor gave us a peach tree for a wedding gift. Three years later as we were floundering together through grief, struggling each day to communicate with each other, tongues and brains numbed with sadness, both lost in our own dark worlds, the tree began to fail. The leaves yellowed and began to fall in the summer. I was too tired for a while to figure out what was wrong with it. Every day, I looked at our wedding tree and told myself it was not symbolic. I finally found the hole by the base of the tree where something had burrowed in, turning the trunk to mush. We scraped it out and hoped. The tree died. Six years later, we are still here. It was not symbolic. It was a just tree, dying too soon. That little boy of mine did that too.
His death, so many people would tell you, was supposed to help get my priorities straight, help me figure out just what to do with my wild, precious life, but I’m stuck like most of us in the mundane most days—folding laundry, making lunch, paying bills, getting to swimming lessons on time. I try to stop and notice, to really pay attention to the vivid faces of the zinnias in my garden and the fresh green smell of the cilantro I accidentally pull with the weeds. I try to really focus on K’s earnest face as she tells me about the fairies who came to her fairy house. I brush a wisp of blond hair away from her eyes, feel the excitement trembling through her. The moss is soft and damp underneath me as we sit in the green shade. K squats low, showing me how to make the house more inviting, more private so fairies will like them. Part of me zooms in on her small fingers poking, pointing, but part of me is poised to do, not the important things of this life, but the weeding and the work that keeps telling me it needs to get done, calling louder than the fairies or the birds or the rest of this summer day.
Your Turn
Write with Me:
Read Oliver’s poem or choose another poem to inspire you. Then start writing. Maybe you’ll mirror the subject or the theme of the poem, or maybe a particular word or phrase will evoke a memor or spark an idea. Take 15 minutes or so and just keep writing see where the poem takes you.
Share It:
Share your writing in the comments or email me at sarabarrywrites@gmail.com. I’d love to hear what you came up with.
Want another quick writing activity? Download Summer Stories in Five Minutes.
I grew up with wild blueberries in our yard and the woods behind it. For years, though I’ve picked large, cultivate berries at PYO places. I love those too, but the tiny, flavorful wild berries still had a place in my heart. Now they have a place in my freezer too, thanks to the Benson Place.
