Tag: blueberries

Gardening

Brought to you by the letter B

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a round basket filled with bright green basil leaves
fresh blueberries in a gray and blue porcelain bowl

If we were on Sesame Street, today’s harvest would be a B – day with a Basket of Basil, a Bunch of Broccoli, and a little bit of Blueberries.

The basil is drying in the oven, the broccoli is ready for tonight’s salad and the blueberries may make muffins, grace vanilla ice cream, or simply provide the perfect snack.  We anticipate a meager berry season as this first picking only yielded a cup and did not fill the Caradori bowl.  Thus, the tasty decisions must be made with careful deliberation.

After the Bs, my alphabet harvest gets a bit jumbled, as I also harvested Mini-Me™ cucumbers (a first time variety in our garden) and rhubarb for another dozen scones.

Gardening

Morning Harvest

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flat straw basket setting on gravel and holding green beans, tomatoes, red peppers and a spring of thyme

With Boston looming large on my calendar, followed by a week at home and then flying to Montréal, (I am still befuddled as to how I have 13 travel days in just one month) I am focused on home-centered tasks; the garden this morning and moving furniture this afternoon to prepare for the new living room floor.

  • Green beans – picked, blanched and frozen although an evening’s serving size has been set aside to sauté with thyme.
  • Blueberries – harvested and baked; this time in scones.
  • Tomatoes – just for eating; and likewise
  • Peppers – ready for some dish yet to be selected for our summer dining menus.
Baking

Blueberry Day

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seven blueberry muffins on a blue plate resting on a wood table

While it is officially National Swiss Day (celebratory greetings to all my Swiss cousins!) I have declared this to be Blueberry Day at our house.  I am feeling a time crunch to put our freshly picked produce to good use before leaving for Boston – but more about upcoming travels in tomorrow’s post.  A Double Good Blueberry Pie is chilling in the refrigerator and Blueberry Lemon Muffins are on the menu as tomorrow’s breakfast treat with a few tucked into the freezer for frigid January mornings.

We estimate one more picking will complete this season’s crop.  Our four bushes have produced 16.25 cups thus far; much better than last summer’s yield of only 9.5 cups but not nearly up to the bountiful summers of 2019 and 2020 with 24 and 25 cups, respectively.

The Double Good Blueberry Pie is super easy and, as promised, doubly good with two cups of fresh berries serving as the fruit base in a baked pie shell then topped with two cups of cooked glazed berries.  We will add a dollop of Crème Fraîche to make it extra festive.  

As I misplaced the paper copy of the Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins (shared by Betty D. last summer) and the web address produced an error message, I spent this morning recipe sleuthing (always a fun task.)  The Preppy Kitchen covered my bases – blueberries, lemon and sour cream – although my muffins exclude the streusel topping, all the better to enjoy the berries.

Bon Appétit!

Baking

Summer sweets for our winter pleasure

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left to right: two triangular scones, three slices of bread, five blueberry muffins on a clear plate with painted blue flowers
Rhubarb Pecan Scones, Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread and Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins – July 2021

The beauty and the bane of summer bounty are the kitchen hours required to transform a morning’s abundance into delicious treats.  On blue sky, temperature-perfect days just made for hours of pleasure on my screened porch knitting the 4-Day Fireworks KAL sweater, I joined the women of ages past toiling in summer kitchens.  Admittedly, my experience was far more pleasant as my work time was spent in air conditioned comfort with good tunes coming from surround sound.  Some of the tasty delights will be eaten immediately and some will be stashed in our small deep freeze to be enjoyed on frigid winter days as a talisman against the cold and a sunny reminder that spring will come, even in the North Country.

My Sunday & Monday garden-to-kitchen yield:

  • Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins – two dozen regular-sized and 24 minis using  a recipe shared by Betty D. from Older Mommy Still Yummy
  • 16 Rhubarb Pecan Scones – an annual favorite from Rhubarb Renaissance by Kim Ode 
  • Two loaves of Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread – courtesy of Mary Ann H. and the St. Ann’s Parish Cookbook, Olmitz, Kansas; and
  • Tsatsiki – The Enchanted Broccoli Forest variety just because we have an abundance of cucumbers and it goes so well with toasted pita bread and Greek seasoned chicken-kabobs.

Bon appétit!

Gardening · Writing

Blueberries after a year & a month of blogging

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First Picking – 2021

Inspired by Suleika Jaouad, I started Knit+ Librarian as a Covid survival technique early into our worldwide pandemic quarantine hoping to capture random thoughts and images.  Over the past year and a month, I never gave any thought to what might happen as topics cycled back through my life.  I knew the Knitting and Reading blog posts would stay fresh as there would always be a just-knit sweater or shawl to describe or a new favorite book to review.  But with today’s first picking of blueberries even while reveling in their dusty blue hues, I realized there may be some repetition in the Baking and Gardening categories whether I am describing the last rhubarb crisp of the summer or this season’s blueberries. 

There is a simple beauty in the natural cycles each following one after another, season by season which especially deserve our appreciation in this northern clime where we go from warm days of verdant greens to frigid, frosty whites and grays and back again.  And, I am certainly in good blogging company, as Christina Campbell on The Healthy Knitter shares monthly posts about each full moon and Solène Le Roux at Knit Pause leads meditative knitting retreats focused on nature.  As I celebrate the ebb and flow of the seasons in our garden sans any exotic varieties and filled with plants I can only describe by their common names without knowledge of scientific nomenclature, I will simply enjoy “playing in the dirt” and you may see a similar but never identical new post or photo.

Baking

In the bleak midwinter … solstice sweets

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Each year we celebrate the Solstice, acknowledging the shortest day, celebrating a holy darkness, and enjoying a special meal.  In a year where nothing was as it was supposed to be, it felt even more important last night to gather fresh evergreens, bake a sweet treat and claim tradition.  

Needing a recipe that did not require an extra trip to the store since we had already picked up our drive-through, online order, I landed on Easy French Almond Cake from the café sucre farine.  Just as promised in the intro, “Incredibly delicious cake and it’s incredibly easy!”  I did modify it slightly (a baker’s prerogative) as I replaced the orange glaze and sliced almonds garnish with Cafe Delites’s homemade blueberry sauce.  Bon appétit!

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
     Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894

Baking · Gardening

Blueberries – first to last

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When we started harvesting blueberries last month, we doubted we would meet the bountiful 24 cups we picked last summer.  But the wonders of the Great Mother never cease to amaze and we have enjoyed 25 cups from our four small bushes.  So delicious have been the muffins, ice cream glazes, and pies (two lemon sour cream and one traditional) with plenty simply nibbled that none were frozen.  While we may regret our greediness in the depth of winter blues, the fresh berries were just too tempting.  Since today’s last picking only yielded enough (0.5 cup) for tomorrow’s Honey Nut Cheerios breakfast, I am repurposing the photo from our first picking.