Blackberries, a brilliant summer delight

 

 Part of the fun of seasonal eating is enjoying what's available in as many different ways as possible. There is little else as glorious as a sun ripened blackberry fresh off the cane, but if you know a good picking spot or happen upon a gallon at the market, there are numerous fantastic ways you can include fresh blackberries in your diet.

One of the most familiar and most delicious is blackberry cobbler. There are almost as many blackberry cobbler recipes as there are blackberry canes in an abandoned hay field, but here's a very easy, very basic one. Melt ½ cup (1 stick) butter in a 2 quart casserole dish by placing in the oven as you preheat to 350. Combine 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt, and 2/3 cup milk and mix well. Toss 2 ½ to 3 cups of fresh or frozen blackberries with 1-2 tablespoons of sugar. Pour batter into melted better; do not stir. Spoon blackberries over the batter, but don't stir. Bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown. I like to add sorghum to my berries, and I add a little vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg to the batter when I make cobbler. 

Try making your own whipping cream to top the cobbler. Use an electric mixer to whip some heavy whipping cream until it starts to make peaks. Add a teaspoon of confectioners sugar and a dash of vanilla, then whip until it's a little stiffer. Be sure the cream is cold. Some people even recommend refrigerating your bowl and beaters, but I've never taken those extra steps. It's so easy to make, and so much better than the canned whipped cream!

You can also make a fantastic salad dressing from fresh or frozen blackberries. Muddle (mash) a couple tablespoons of berries, combine with a teaspoon of honey, a couple tablespoons of white wine vinegar, and a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil. You can dress up a simple green salad, or even try this dressing over warm sautéed greens.

Light meats like pork, chicken, and white fish pair beautifully with the tart, bright flavor of a blackberry marinade. Starting with the same base as the salad dressing, muddled berries, honey, and white wine vinegar, add spices like cumin, black pepper, salt, and just a dash of cinnamon. Or you could try leaving out the cumin and cinnamon and add fresh herbs, like basil and thyme instead. Spoon over the meat and marinate for a couple hours before cooking. Make extra marinade to serve on the cooked meat.

Another way to enjoy blackberries is to make a refreshing magenta blackberry punch. Using a spoon, clean the skin off a 1” chunk of fresh ginger. Combine ginger, 1 ½ to 2 cups blackberries, one cup sugar, and ¾ cup lemon juice in a blender. Process until well blended. Pour mixture into pitcher and combine with water at a ratio of 1:3, mixture to water. You can add more or less water depending on your preference. 

To make a fizzy punch, dilute with water instead of ginger ale. Serve with a mint or basil garnish. Served cold, this punch is a great way to cool down during a hot summer afternoon. It would be beautiful at a picnic or wedding. And if imbibing your corn instead of eating it on the cob is your style, this punch would pair wonderfully with the brews from Short Mountain Distillery in Woodbury.

Blackberries are part of the group of plant species that transition open ground back to forest. They pop up where ground has been disturbed and goes without being mowed for long periods of time. That's why you'll see them growing along roadsides and in neglected pastures and hayfields. Blackberries are perennials; the canes die back each year, but the roots survive the winter in the ground.

Harvesting blackberries is a fun but delicate task. I wear long pants, long sleeves, solid shoes, and long gloves. It's easiest to pick with both hands free. 

You can cut out the front of a milk jug, put your belt or a string through the handle, and tie it around your waist. It's best for the berries and most comfortable for the picker to go early in the morning, but you should go any time you can. 

Picking blackberries in the summertime was an integral part of my summertime growing up in the South. When the sun is hot and you're surrounded by a blackberry bramble you can smell the fruit ripening in the afternoon heat. I learned by experimentation that the bigger, more supple berries are the juiciest and sweetest. The little ones are more tart but have a very strong flavor. Those little ones are great for making jellies and jam.

It's extremely easy to freeze blackberries. Just pick through the berries to get out any little stems or leaves and arrange in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Put in the freezer until frozen through, then pour them in a freezer bag. You can make any of the recipes above with frozen berries. They're also a great way to pep up a cold winter morning's pancakes or a bowl of yogurt and granola.

Blackberries are an excellent source of vitamins C, K, and E, folate, magnesium, potassium, manganese, copper, and dietary fiber. The intense color of blackberries is due to their high concentration of anthocyanin antioxidants, which support your body's immune system. A cup of blackberry and honey tea sipped the grips of a dreary winter cold can help give your body the boost it needs to heal itself.

Harvesting wild blackberries is a great way to get into foraging for wild foods. Blackberries are easy to spot and positively identify and easy to harvest and process. You can't pick too many, and it would be hard to trample any patch to the point of compromising the next year's growth. Foraging reconnects you with the wild world, of which you are indelibly a part. If you're looking out for a perfect patch of blackberries on the side of the road, you notice more of the natural community of plants that surrounds us, instead of passing it all by in a blur of green as you dash down the highway. 

If you don't have time or can't be bothered to pick these seasonal beauties for yourself, please understand why they're rather expensive. Picking the berries without marring your hands and forearms is an act of grace and rapt concentration, even with sleeves and gloves. The berries are little, and while they do grow in dense patches, it's surprising how long it can take to painstakingly move through a maze of thorny canes as tall as you are. They don't keep very long, so any berries you buy at the market haven't been off their canes very long. 

The blackberry harvest can be a challenge, but it's a welcome challenge. I spend February evenings fantasizing about the sun roasted fruit and fresh cobbler with whipped cream makes. Those sweet culinary payoffs make all the tick bites worth it.

Squash season

There's nothing like the first summer squash feast of the season. Those golden, tender slices cooked with onions. Or made into a creamy casserole with cheese, bread crumbs or crackers, and a little milk, seasoned with just a little salt and pepper. The succulent, slightly sweet flesh is so versatile that it pairs deliciously with many other garden veggies.

A couple plants can keep a family's table covered in squash every day for weeks. Its versatility is a major boon, since those sunny yellow squash can really pile up when the season gets going.

Summer squash is full of many important nutrients, including B-vitamins, vitamin C, molybdemun, manganese, and fiber, in addition to being a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are lacking in the typical Western diet.

When you're selecting summer squash, choose squash with unblemished, tender skin. If you get any with bruises, you should use those first. Unblemished squash will keep in the fridge for at least a week.

To maintain more the great nutrients in summer squash, avoid boiling it and be sure to eat the skin. You can slightly steam, roast, grill, sauté, and even freeze squash and still maintain all its nutrients. 

Skewer baby squash, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and throw them on a hot grill until tender. Wrap up the whole baby squash or chopped large squash in an aluminum foil packet, place on the grill away from the direct heat, and by the time your chicken or hot dogs are done, the squash will be perfectly cooked. You can also just toss baby squash or chopped squash with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast in the oven at 325 for about twenty minutes. You can add whole baby onions or thick slices of onion to any of those cooking methods with delicious effect.

To freeze squash, thickly slice the bigger fruit or use the little ones whole. Lightly blanch, then freeze in a single layer on a cookie sheet. After frozen solid, place them in an airtight bag. When you defrost it, put you can put it on the grill, sauté, or steam the squash, and it will be almost as good as it is fresh.

One of our farm's favorite ways to cook up squash or zucchini is to sauté it with some swiss chard. Slice up some onions and squash into ¼ inch thick slices. Strip the chard leaves off the ribs and chop the ribs into inch long sections. Sauté the onions, squash, and chard ribs for 3-4 minutes in extra virgin olive oil or coconut oil over medium-high heat. Add the ripped up chard leaves and cook for another 4-5 minutes. Season with sea salt and fresh pepper and a dash of white whine vinegar. The color combination of this dish is out of this world.

Sauteed squash with chard makes a great side dish that's packed with vitamins and minerals. In addition to an array of phytonutrients and antioxidants, both squash and chard are rich in fiber, which helps regulate the speed at which carbohydrates are converted to simple sugars during the digestive process. Regulating that process minimizes blood sugar spikes. Maximizing your consumption of fresh produce is a great way to help manage diabetes. 

 

You can turn your sautéed squash, onions, and chard into a meatless main course dish by combining it with a whole wheat chunky pasta or tortellinis. The combination of the vegetables and pasta provide you with plenty of protein for a complete meal, but the flavors go great with a meat addition, too.

image from www.crumblycookie.net

Another creative way to use squash and zucchini is to grate the whole thing, skin on, and use it as a beautiful, edible garnish. You can serve it over a great green salad, or feature the grated squash and zucchini as its own salad. Dress the grated flesh with some a red wine vinaigrette. To make the vinaigrette, combine red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil at a 1 to 3 ratio and season with a touch of salt and pepper. Toss with some freshly chopped basil, mint, or oregano for a gourmet touch.

Eating healthy and fresh is easy when there's so much great produce around. Be sure to check out the market this week and load up on healthy, beautiful food for your family!

Garlic scapes

image from Fifth Season Garden Co

This weekend at the market you'll be able to pick up handmade soaps and lotions, fried pies, baked goods, barbecue, smoked meats, and tomato and other summer vegetable plants. If you're putting plants in the ground right now, be sure you're prepared to give them some water. The soil is dry, and the days are hot. I recently read that our area's average rainfall in April is around 4 inches, but we only received two this year. It's hard to imagine that this time last year, the soil was water logged, and we were worried about the creek flooding our garden.

It seems pretty much everything is happening a month early this year. The dogwoods, mayapples, blackberries, and redbuds were all early. We were eating mounds of watercress well into May last year, but this year it's already become very spicy and is flowering. We are still using the flowers to spice up and beautify our salads. Our elephant garlic (which is actually a leek) sent up its scapes over a week ago already, and I saw the first scapes on our hard neck garlic at the beginning of this week. Those are a month early, too.

Garlic scapes are the flowering stalk sent up by each head of garlic. Each clove of garlic that you plant and mulch in the fall will produce a head of cloves, and each of those heads will send up a scape. Some people leave the scapes on the plant, and some people who cut the scapes just throw them away. Cutting the scapes encourages development of bigger cloves, and scapes are absolutely delicious.

You can cook the scapes the same way you cook green beans. They have the same crisp, crunchy texture of a fresh green bean with the flavor and kick of raw garlic. You can sauté the scapes in some butter and olive oil, which will tone down their punch a little, and dress them with just a touch of salt. You can chop and add them to stews and soups just before serving for a sharp, raw garlic accent or add them ten minutes before serving to mellow the flavor a bit.

We let our scapes grow until they develop their first curl. They are usually 6 or 7 inches long at that point, but the flowering head is still firmly encased. You can pick them later, but the lower part of the stalk will get tough as the scape gets taller. The case around the flowering head will also get a little tougher as the plant matures, but you can always just snip it off. If the garlic goes to blossom, you can use the blossoms raw to add a beautiful garnish to your cooked dishes or to elevate your salads from blasé to gourmet.

You should dig your garlic after the leaves have turned yellow but before the whole plant turns totally brown. Use a fork to loosen the soil before pulling them up to reduce the number of heads that get left behind. Even with careful harvesting, it seems like you'll inevitably miss a couple cloves which will happily sprout and show up next year.

Cure the garlic by placing the whole plant in the shade where it will have good air circulation. Some people also cure their garlic right where it was harvested, but the flavor of some varieties of garlic changes when exposed to sunlight. When the papers are thoroughly dried, snip off the stem with some hand shears. To prepare your seed stock, gently separate the cloves and save some of the largest to plant in the fall.

For your culinary garlic, leave the heads in tact and store in a dark, cool, dry place. Stored garlic can withstand light freezing and thawing, but should be kept from freezing through on very cold nights. You'll be able to enjoy your garlic well into the following spring.

a summer day

This morning I worked for six hours in the garden. I planted some mustard, pruned and tied up tomatoes, picked tomatoes, and forked and weeded. When it finally got too hot to be out in the sun, Kevin and I went to the creek. We took a mask and snorkle and held on to the big rocks where the water rushes through little bottlenecks and watched the bubbles glistening in the sunlight, dappled through the leaves of a big Sycamore. I made a tomato and cucumber salad with basil and the vinegar our CSA customer gave us on Saturday. Where the water swirls around, you can feel the warm and cold water mixing. We had the whole place to ourselves for a couple hours. It was like being at a private resort. I found a great geode. I feel so lucky to have such a wonderful life.

We're starting our second 10-week period this week. I planted more chard yesterday, and the squash I planted late last week is already up. Hopefully the bugs will let us have a few more squash before it will suddenly be frost season again. The tomatoes are going crazy; we sold over 30 lbs of tomatoes at the market on Saturday! We also sold all our greens and a half bushel of cucumbers--all by 11am. The mung beans are up, and soon I have to start thinking about cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, Asain greens, lettuce, more kale...

Back to work!

the dog days of summer

I knew I wouldn't be great about keeping up with the blog. I was right. I'm doing better with our Facebook page, though. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, and I've been posting lots of pictures.

The Smithville market has been absolutely fantastic. There are some things that don't sell--fingerling potatoes and flowers. But Jason, at Evin's Mill, absolutely loved the fingerlings and wanted more than we have to sell. Everyone seems to love the Technicolor tomatoes and Lemon cucumbers. Delikatesse cucs, not so much. I think they look too much like the cucumbers the other vendors have. We've had several people ask about joining the CSA. We start our second 10-week period next week. So far I'm really glad we split up the growing season into the shorter periods. I'm a little nervous about adding more customers, but I worry all the time and it usually works out, so I'm just going to go for it.

Our Watertown customers make my heart sing. We took my mother to Nona Lisa Pizzeria, owned by Katie and John Smith, our CSA customers, and we enjoyed drop-dead-delicious pizza and a fiddle-accompanied birthday serenade. After that, we caught some world class music at the Blue Tomato, and Mom got another round of the birthday song from everyone in the house. It was great.

As for the garden: the squash are all dead. By next week we will have zero [0] producing squash plants. The vine borers wore us out. Brutal. We're putting in beans and brassicas in the wake of the squash. From my conversations with the other farmers at the market, we are not alone in our losing battle. The tomatoes are starting to pour out of the garden, while some of the cucumbers are beginning to slack off a little bit. Peppers are ripening. Onions and beets are all gone, their beds weeded and mulched, waiting for lettuce and squash to be replanted. The beans are kicking in, despite the Japanese beetles' best attempts. Our pumpkins and winter squash look better than they did a few weeks ago, and they are really starting to grow fast. The Joyners said their blueberries will be in soon. I could never express how excited I am for early mornings in their forest with my mouth stuffed with the best blueberries on the face of the planet.

We've had a heat index over 100 the last couple days, so we've been spending a lot of time at Redneck Riviera.

It turns out all the reading I did has been extremely helpful. However, nothing in any book could ever really prepare you for gardening in Middle Tennessee. This place is nuts.

Everyday I become more convinced that there is no more beautiful place in the world than right here. When I'm driving Glug Glug down Dry Creek and there are puffy white clouds drifting through the blue blue sky past the emerald green of these ancient hills, I can't help but feel like I live in a storybook. The sunflowers look like ladies with big yellow faces wearing green dresses towering over the garden. Queen Anne's Lace is covering all the fallow fields in a lacy white blanket. The Goldenrod and Ironweed are reaching their mature height--7 feet--and will soon be an explosion of yellow and purple. A lot of the rural roads look like paths through the jungle right now.

The garden looked like a jungle until Monday, when a writer from Wilson County came out to interview us about the farm. We were in a tizzy that morning, mowing, weeding, and generally trying to impose some semblance of order over the unruly tangle of green that our garden has become. And then today I got an email from the Watertown Gazette: a second interview request!

Things are going great. We couldn't ask for our first year to be unfolding any better. I am so grateful that this is my life. I love being here. I love farming.

And we still love our lovable loo!