Unlooked for blessings

I have a confession to make. For the last few years, as I have felt gradually worse and worse, I’ve been a bad gardener. I mean, a really bad gardener. I’ve let my herb garden, that I worked so hard to establish, go wild, and blackberries bushes and wild grapevines have taken over. However, it has proven one of my favorite quotes, which has been attributed to Aaron Burr, which is “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow, because something may occur which may make you regret your preliminary action.”

That something is wild blackberries, which I love, and which are ripe right now. I pulled into my parking space when I got home from work today, and they called my name. I happened to have a small box in the car, so I got out and picked a bunch of blackberries before I even went inside. (The herb garden is right in front of my parking space.)

Picking them was a little bit of an adventure. First, there was negotiating the blackberry bushes themselves, with their nasty little thorns. There are also rose bushes in the herb garden, which also have lots of nasty little thorns (no surprise, since blackberries are actually members of the rose family – and yes, they ganged up on me). But the wild grapevines turned out to be helpful, because they’ve twined around everything, making nice thornless handles that let me pull blackberry canes to me without having to grab them. And the lavender and rosemary that are growing under and around all of this smelled wonderful as I was picking the blackberries on this beautiful summer afternoon.

I don’t know why, but domesticated blackberries taste nothing like wild blackberries – they’re bland and don’t have the tang and bite of wild blackberries. I don’t know if that’s because they’ve bred for size rather than taste – which wouldn’t surprise me, as that seems to be what happened with strawberries – but I don’t even bother buying blackberries in the store. But wild blackberries are a real treat.

When I was a kid, we used to go on blackberry expeditions and bring back buckets full of them, along with countless mosquito bites and sunburns, all so worth it. They’re delicious eaten straight out of hand, and I love them over cereal, but the best way to eat them is in blackberry pie.

My mother used to make insanely delicious blackberry pies. I don’t remember her ever using a recipe for them, and from my memory of them, I think all she did was add a little sugar to the berries, put them in a pie shell, top them with a streusel topping, and bake them. I’ve never tried to make one before, and I didn’t really get enough berries for a whole pie, but I did get about two cups, which is enough for a tart, so that’s what I’m trying tonight.

I washed the berries well and picked over them to remove any caps that came in with the berries, then let them dry. I have some soup bowls that are oven safe that make nice deep dish tart pans, so I lined one with pie crust. I sprinkled a little white sugar and a little cornstarch over the berries and mixed them by hand. (The cornstarch is to thicken the juices as the tart bakes.) Then I poured the berries into the crust lined bowl.

To make the streusel topping, I mixed light brown sugar and all purpose flour, then cut in butter. I used roughly equal amounts of sugar and butter and a little less flour. I then added oatmeal, about the same amount as the amount of flour. Note that when you do this, don’t use quick-cooking oatmeal – use the kind that takes 5 minutes to cook. The other stuff dissolves into mush and the topping won’t have the texture you want. Also, streusel is not rocket science – the amounts can vary and you’ll still have a nice streusel. And, if you have them and you want to, you can add chopped nuts, pretty much any kind of nuts you want. I like pecans or almonds, but I don’t see why any other kind of nuts won’t work.

If the idea of being this off-hand with the amounts scares you, there are at least a million recipes for streusel topping on the internet. Go look one up and use its proportions. I actually ended up making a little more than I needed for this particular dish. I just tossed the extra. (For those of you who freak at the idea of throwing away food – and you know who you are – relax, it was only a couple of tablespoons.)

I crumbled the topping over the berries and put the dish (on a baking sheet in case it boiled over) into a 400 degree oven for 35 minutes. It smelled fabulous while it was cooking. Once I took it out, I let it cool for about 30 minutes, then ate about half of it. It tasted exactly like I remember my mother’s blackberry pie tasting, which was a very nice surprise, because I didn’t think I’d get it right on the first try.

I suppose I really do need to get out there eventually and grub out the blackberry bushes and the wild grapevines and all the other things that have grown up in the herb garden that really shouldn’t be there, but I kind of hate to lose the blackberries. Ah, well – I guess that’s the price of civilization.

Advertisement