I've been busy lately. My husband picked wild blackberries for me and some good friends of ours (even better friends since they did all the picking...) picked some chokecherries for us. So I did what women used to do. I "put things by". They used that term to describe all the cooking, canning, drying, freezing and otherwise preserving they did. They put their bounty by for a day when food wasn't as bountiful, like say, the dead of winter when you're buried under 3 feet of snow and can't remember what it felt like to be warm, let alone what it felt like to pick berries on a hot summer day. Sounds like a good time to pop open some bottled summer. Not that we are ever buried under 3 feet of snow where I live, but we have good imaginations here.
I froze some of the blackberries in batches for future blackberry cobbler (a family favorite), and made Wild Blackberry Jam with the rest. I made it in the same way I made the Wild Raspberry Jam adjusting the sugar for the sweetness or tartness of the berries. The kids smeared it on homemade 3-Grain Waffles this morning. They seemed pretty happy.
I turned the Chokecherries into Chokecherry Jelly. Now we are just waiting for it to cool so we can try some. I've got bread dough rising on the counter. By the time the jelly is ready, the fresh bread will be too. Ahhh, life is good.
What do you do with your bounty? Or does your bounty reside on the shelves of the nearest Walmart until you are ready for it (which is not a bad strategy if pantry storage is a problem...)?
