Blackberry Picking and Blackberry Jam

Well, since I am NOT packing up and driving to Edmonton to start another semester of school this fall, I have time to do what I have wistfully thought of each year, the past three years, at the end of August– go pick blackberries.

I have been picking twice the past few days: once last Saturday. I picked enough for making jam, making Bill Granger’s coconut-blackberry bars, and freezing two litre bags full of berries. I also scraped up my hands and arms quite badly. After a couple of days to heal, I went back again this afternoon and picked again, more for the freezer, and enough to make more jam tomorrow.

We would have made jam today, except that we canned dill and garlic cucumber pickles today, and made mango chutney (my great-great Aunt Nora’s recipe, really good). So it was too much canning for one day. But I am really looking forward to making more blackberry jam tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, as I walked around the neighborhood, all the blackberry flowers were out. You could tell summer was moving on because instead of smelling lilacs, or virburnums, or roses, you could smell hot sun baking blackberry, fir, and cedar scents out of the earth. –If I haven’t mentioned it before, the Pacific Northwest frequently smells like heaven, but that’s an aside. Now I am picking blackberries that are sagging off the brambles, looking like they are going to burst with purple-black juice, and batting away wasps who are eager to get their scaly selves in on the sugar produced by this fruit.

I feel sorry for anyone whose only contact with blackberries is through the ridiculously overpriced, sour little bullets you can buy at the grocery store. Ripe blackberries are soft, with a winelike smell and a distinctive taste that only develops when they are completely ripe. But of course, when they are completely ripe they crush easily and drip juice. They are not transportable at all, which is why you can’t get really ripe fruit at the store. Oh, and the taste can be refrigerated out of them, too.

Anyway, enough of that. Here is the recipe we are using for blackberry jam.

Blackberry Jam

9 cups of ripe berries

6 cups of sugar

1 cooking apple, peeled, cored, and grated (to provide the pectin, or setting agent, the berries lack)

Put everything in a large (very large) pot. Like a stockpot. Mix it together and leave it to sit for a few minutes until the berries produce juice. You want the juice, to make sure the berries don’t burn on the bottom of the pot. Bring to the boil on the stove on high, then turn down to medium high and watch. Don’t stir too often, as this causes the jam to lose heat, and you want to build as much heat as you can in the jam. You’re looking to get the jam up to 220 Farenheit, if you have a thermometer. After it comes to the boil, scum will develop on the surface. Skim the scum off and get rid of it. In a while the jam will start to look “jammy” around the edges of the pot and not watery. At this point, if you don’t have a thermometer, do a jam test: take a very cold cold plate (put one in the freezer when you start the jam) and drop a teaspoonful on the plate. Wait a moment. Then push your finger into it. If the the jam holds the mark of your finger, then the jam is done, and you are ready to seal it into sterilized jars. Another jam test is to hold a large spoon horizontal to the pot, after dipping it into the jam, and watching to see if you get strands starting to form as the jam drips off. Be careful at this stage not to let the jam catch and burn on the bottom of the pan. You need to stir it occasionally, but not much so you don’t lose heat. Once the jam is ready, take of the heat and stir for a couple of minutes to make sure the berry pieces still intact stay evenly distributed through the jam.

I’m not going to explain about how to can– an excellent resource on how to can all kinds of foods is the cookbook “Joy of Cooking”. Please do not be tempted to use an artificial setting agent. There is no need for it, since the apple provides all the natural pectin necessary. This apple means that the jam has a firm set, like American jam, rather than the runny set the French jams have.

If you have never been blackberrying yourself and want to try it out, here are some helpful tips:

1. Abandon your fashion sense. Dress to cover as much of yourself as you possibly can as protection against the brambles, which have very large thorns. Be resigned to coming home liberally spattered with purple juice, stained hands, and large scratches.

2. Always pick higher than a dog can pee. I was given this advice as a child and have never regretted following it.

3. Make sure your blackberry patch is not on a highway or busy road. The fruit will pick up poisons from car fumes that make the fruit tasteless and unpleasant, and, incidentally, unhealthy for you.

4. Take a bent wire hanger or a cane for hauling down the hard to reach brambles. The most tempting berries are always the ones that are just out of reach (in this, as in life).

I’m sorry, but there are no pictures of the blackberry jam. Jam sitting in a Mason jar isn’t that interesting. And I didn’t take any pictures while jam making, because, frankly, taking pictures while jam making is a sure way to get a really nasty burn. If you live somewhere that you can pick ripe berries and you are able to make jam I really encourage you to do so. In three days we have already finished one jar of this jam. It is really quite amazingly good.

Educational moment: Did you know that the blackberries we see growing in empty lots and alongside roads are actually an European import? It’s the Himalayan blackberry. There is an indigenous wild blackberry (indigenous to North America, I mean) but I have not yet encountered it. My sister has though and she says the berries are wonderful.

Apricot Crostada

Apricots are a summer fruit that I love cooked. I can’t get enthusiastic about the taste of raw apricots, and I am sure that I am not alone in this. With a little cardboard box of apricots in the fridge, and the need to make a new kind of pie upon me, I set to work checking my possible ingredients available in the kitchen. Apricot and almond? No ground almonds. Apricot and cherry? Not enough cherries. Just plain apricot? I had heard of apricot pies…but I didn’t have enough apricots to fill a whole pie by themselves. This is where I would normally have pulled out the Normandy Apricot Tart recipe, but I needed something new and exciting for my pie project. I only have *some three pies left to make, after all!

I decided to do an apricot crostada, building on a recipe that Ina Garten has in her “Barefoot Contessa” cookbook. It’s buttery, sugary pastry holding chunks of sweet-tart apricot, topped with butter streusel and a small hit of lemon. So here is my apricot crostada, a la Barefoot Contessa. A rustic-looking dessert, but a good one.

Apricot Crostada

Make the pastry:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup cold butter

1/4 cup sugar

3 tablespoons of ice water

Mix together the sugar and flour. Cut the butter into the flour and sugar with a pastry cutter, two knives, or (my preference) a medium hole grater. Blend into flour with fingertips until the butter is in flakes and crumbs. Gently stir in the ice water, then mix with hands until it just comes together. Shape into a ball and put the dough in the refrigerator to chill for an hour.

At the end of the hour, preheat the oven to 450 Farenheit. Roll out the pastry to an 11″ circle on a lightly floured surface.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Place the pastry circle in the centre of the lined cookie sheet. Now make the filling:

8-10 ripe apricots (little under a pound)

zest of one lemon

1 tablespoon of lemon juice

4-5 tablespoons of granulated sugar, depending on if you like the tartness of apricots or want it a little sweeter

pinch of salt

Cut the apricots into wedges (4 or 6 wedges depending on the size of the apricots). Toss with lemon zest, juice, sugar, and salt. Pile into the pastry circle, leaving a 1 1/2 inch edge (in my pictures you’ll see that I made my edge too deep; I’m covering too much of the streusel and fruit). Now top with the streusel:

4 tablespoons of all-purpose flour

4 tablespoons of sugar

pinch salt

2 tablespoons soft butter

Mix together the flour, sugar, and salt. Rub in the butter, until the mixture resembles crumbs. Scatter this streusel over the fruit. Now turn the pastry edge up over the fruit, folding it in an attractive pattern (this takes more practice than I can command, as you can also see in my pictures).

Brush with the pastry edges with milk and sprinkle with sugar if you like. Bake at 450 Farenheit for 20 to 25 minutes, until fruit juices start to bubble and the crostada is browned. Serves 4.

In today’s Olympics news I’d like to say that I’m excited about Emilie Hayman’s silver in diving. Go Canada! Also excited about the US win in men’s beach volleyball over Brazil– very exciting. Go USA! In gardening news we had baby carrots, beets, onions, and scarlet runner beans, all from the garden, as part of our dinner today. We’re also getting little handfuls of blueberries already from our blueberry bushes, although they were only planted a couple of months ago. Go garden!

*I did make a couple more raspberry pies while my nephews were here. They agreed that they really liked the pie, but they rank it second to their father’s dutch oven peach cobbler. I tried to get them to strictly judge it as a pie, not in a generic desserts category, but they would not be deterred from rating it against the peach cobbler. I heard every detail of how it’s made. Just so you know, this magnificent peach cobbler is made with cake mix, and canned peaches and their syrup. It’s then cooked in a dutch oven next to a campfire, which apparently works a miraculous transformation on these ingredients. I couldn’t help but think their palates need educating.

Not about the food

This is a post for all you blog stalkers out there, so you have something to read while you are slacking off at work, and can find out what I have been up to without asking directly (because that’s the point of blog stalking, right?). I have been doing next to no cooking lately, since I have been running around doing lots of things that don’t involve culinary creativity. I spent a few days in Post Falls Idaho the first week of August for a library conference. The Red Lion in Post Falls is in a great location and is the nicest place in town (way nicer than the other options) but the food is lousy, lousy, lousy. I researched all these restaurants for us to try in Coeur d’Alene but we only made it to two of them and I wasn’t all that impressed. Moon Time was OK but “Tomato Street” was unspeakable. Check out this picture of a boat, pulling out of the downtown marina in Coeur d’Alene. I very badly want to own this boat. Do you ever feel like you want a boat so badly that you would date someone just to have access to a boat? ….Ahem. Maybe you aren’t that infatuated with boats?

Then this past week I went to Seattle for a job interview, so my mind was on things other than food, again. Plus we’ve had visitors, so it’s a matter of barbecuing burgers, boiling corn on the cob (we get ours locally from a farm called Silver Rill), etc, and not about the new and interesting. Although we did try Bobby Flay’s Texas-style hot dogs, with the coleslaw and sour pickle spear on the dog with a smear of barbecue sauce. I loved that combination. Now I know what to do with the little paper cup of waterlogged coleslaw when I go to a barbecue place. It’s meant to be a condiment.

Here’s a picture taken from the Brentwood Bay ferry the day we went up-island to go zip lining down a canyon:

Doesn’t that water look amazing? I love living in the Pacific Northwest, more than words can say.

More job interviews are coming up, and another house guest on Tuesday. We’re eating lots of fresh fruit (but complaining about the prices) and appreciating the farmer’s market produce.

It’s baking hot here right now, as well — a high of 31 degrees celcius, which means 90 degrees Farenheit. For us, insanely hot. But you know something I love about hot days? The smell of water on a hot day, drifting over from a lake or the ocean, and especially the smell of water on heated wood (which I guess makes it the smell of wet wood?). Anyway, I love it. I don’t love sweating from the heat, though, and I do not love cooking in hot weather. Next week we are supposed to have some rain come in, so maybe I will have something out of the kitchen to show you then.

I heart fishing boats.