Confederacy of a Dunce - Following the Blackberry craze

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

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Once again I've ended up following the fad. Last time it was the novel Trilby, and now I've joined up with the Blackberry users. I didn't mean to, it just sort of happened. Kind of like this....

On Saturday morning I went to our local fruit and veg establishment to pick up a few chili peppers (and perhaps an impulse purchase of some locally-produced snacks of some kind). Having obtained the peppers (hot as blazes, by the way) and aforementioned locally-produced snacks (Japanese-style peanut crackers), I proceeded to the till where I saw another opportunity for impulse purchasing: plastic punnets of blackberries. Why not, I thought to myself, and asked for the price. "One pound" was the answer. A little steep, perhaps, but they looked really tasty, so I started to take one. "No, one pound for all of them." The carton of punnets was full and contained perhaps a dozen of them, each punnet perhaps 250g of the largest blackberries I'd ever seen, perhaps very near their sell-by date but how could I resist several pounds of blackberries for a pound? We sorted them out into "perfect" (say 30% of them), "fine for cooking" (squishy, but fine; perhaps another 60%), and "icky" (moldy or completely squished, the remaining 10%). A sudden influx of ready-to-go-bad fruit calls for desperate measures; fortunately we have several cookbooks by our near-neighbor Nigel Slater who is clearly obsessed with the summer fruits and has published a good number of recipes for the disposal of such. Here's where they went (aside from the sizable proportion that were eaten on their own):

"Perfect" berries went into a little fruit salad with some sliced-up green melon somewhere between a cantaloupe and a honeydew (which by coincidence we had already prepared).

Some of the less-than-perfect berries made their way into corn muffins (made by Mrs. Dunce), modified from a cherry and orange corn muffin recipe (instead of orange juice we used a tropical juice blend which did just fine). I had to chop the blackberries into quarters or sixths (or eighths for the largest of the blackberry gang) but they didn't disintegrate (surprisingly). Mmmmmmmmm.

And finally for Sunday breakfast I prepared a blackberry crumble without the crumble: put the rest of the berries into the bottom of a shallow pan, covered them completely with Greek-style plain yogurt (one of the staple ingredients in our home), then covered the top with a few tablespoons sugar. Popped the whole thing in the oven under a grill set as hot as it would go, and waited for a bit of carmelization. Can I say again, mmmmmmmmmmmm.

And just like that, they were gone (except for the muffins which we are carefully rationing out at a rate of one per person per day). I understand the craze although I couldn't figure out how to check my email (my fingers turned purple trying to compose a message, and I gave up).

consume

Tuesday, August 09, 2005 9:46:32 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)