Sweet surprises

I wasn't expecting to find any ripe raspberries for a couple more weeks, so it was a pleasant surprise to spot a little flash of red in the back of the patch.
There are a couple of canes that seem to have gotten a head start on setting fruit, thanks to the extra warmth thrown off by the cinderblocks of the raised bed they're behind.

Then there's the scruffy tree that I thought was a volunteer (and maybe it was?) that turned out to be a plum:
It's not terribly prolific, but maybe as it matures it will produce more.

Finally, the shrub that hasn't done much in previous years got an extra dose of watering this year thanks to a sprinkler leak. It has a ton of berries on it and I wondered if they are edible. So I went googling around.
Why yes, they're serviceberries! Otherwise known as juneberries or Saskatoon berries. I don't think I've ever eaten one, but I will as soon as these turn purple.

What does one do with serviceberries? Can you make jam with them?

No really. These are the last raspberries

Did you think I was going to present you with another delicious dish full? Alas, no. That last batch in October was pretty much it.

Last year I cut the canes down to a foot high, but the stubs I left did nothing, so this year I took everything down to the ground, and ripped out the outriders.
It looks so desolate now, but I know it's the secret to good fruit on strong canes. My fears of the raspberries being the Audreys of the garden were unfounded.

Click on the Raspberries tag to see photos of them in their prime, plus recipes.

No, seriously ...

These are (probably) the last raspberries.

OK, maybe I shouldn't keep saying that. But they look so much prettier than green tomato casserole photographed in the middle of the night, so I'm posting them for some visual relief.

And look! Autumn-blooming crocus!

Last raspberries?

Three months' worth isn't a bad crop (I picked the first ones July 16). It's supposed to snow and freeze today, so I expect this is the last batch I'll pick.

Though the canes are in a protected corner, so maybe I'll get a few more next week. Maybe.

Nonstop raspberries

I picked my first raspberries of the season on July 16. Here it is nearly the end of September and I'm still picking them!
These are some seriously productive canes.

I took out a little container to fill for lunch, and it proved to be too small. I was obliged to consume a handful immediately just so I could get the lid on.
These last two months I kept thinking "I should make something with these berries, like ice cream or jam." But you know what? They're so perfectly lovely and delicious straight off the vine that I don't feel guilty consuming them that way at all.

Raspberry goat-milk ice cream

I saved out three cups of Cutie's milk from the last batch of ricotta to make ice cream with the abundant raspberries in my yard. I used the same recipe concept as for the honey vanilla ice cream, as it doesn't call for heavy cream.

3 cups of whole milk (goat or cow)
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
vodka
vanilla bean (or a half)
3 cups of berries (or so)
4 beaten egg yolks

First I macerated the fruit in a tablespoon of vanilla sugar (the sugar my beans are stored in) and a splash of vanilla vodka (can't call it true extract yet). I heated the milk with half a vanilla bean, scraped, and the sugar, then threw in the berries. When it was steaming, I ran it through the blender, then whisked it into the egg yolks.

I don't like seeds in my ice cream, so I took the extra effort to force it through a fine chinois. That requires time and patience. The payoff is that all the seeds and berry skins stay behind.

What I was left with was a deep purple, smooth cream. Purple because many of the berries were tending toward overripe. (If you have any kind of fruit past its prime freshness, you can't go wrong by making ice cream with it.) I chilled it overnight, then put it in the ice-cream maker.

Of course, the ice cream came out purple, too. But really good. I think it could've used a tetch more sugar (I used less than half a cup) because I like things sweet. But it tastes very smooth and berrylicious. If I were serving this to company, I would probably top it with berries macerated in a little more sugar, or mix them with sweet whipped cream. Maybe with some dark chocolate cookies on the side.
Other easy frozen treat recipes:
Strawberry balsamic frozen yoghurt
Honey vanilla goat-milk ice cream

Other recently tested goat-milk recipes:
lacto-fermented sauerkraut (with an update)
Mexican chocolate pudding
ricotta cheese
And an excellent use for the ricotta:
Ricotta torte with squash, corn and dill

First raspberries!

Living on the edge(and why you should wear gloves)

I said I was going to put a new root barrier around the raspberries last weekend, but finally got around to it today. After a nap.
This pound-in edging is from Gardeners Supply Co. I bought it 10 years ago and used a fair amount at my old place, but had enough left over for this little job. I use the digging fork to get way down in the soil and rock it side to side, then use the mallet to pound the edging into the loosened soil.
But I'll be using the pliers to pull much of it out again and dig still deeper. You can see it went in nicely on the right side, but as much as I pound on the stuff to the left, it's not going in as deep as I want. So I'll do it again. Not such a little job after all. *sigh*

And then there's this other problem I have: a really bad case of weeding finger. Gardeners, don't let this happen to you! I hate to wear gloves because I can't feel what I'm doing, but as a result I've got some severe callusing, complete with embedded dirt that won't wash out. Ew.

I'm thinking maybe I could get some surgical gloves and cut the fingers off to make a kind of sleeve for my index finger and thumb. Meantime, I may be sleeping with cotton gloves filled with moisturizer for a while.

Berried in yard work

You may remember me threatening last fall to pull out the raspberry canes in the back corner of my garden because they had not been planted with a root barrier and were laying siege to the adjacent beds and lawn. A lot of the berries in the back went unharvested because I couldn't get to them at all. They seemed like they were going to be more trouble than they were worth.

Noooooo! many of you cried. Don't do it!

I wasn't really familiar with how raspberries grow, though; I hadn't realized that they need to be cut back completely in the fall anyway. Once I started pulling out the advancing troops by the roots and hacking back the overgrowth, I found there were four main clumps in the original planting. I named them all Audrey and told them they could stay, if they promised to behave.
As you can see, the Audreys did not suffer from their multiple amputations. But they're still plotting their escape. This weekend the root barrier is going in, and I've been careful to rip out every outlying shoot. These measures should, I hope, keep them in line enough so that I can harvest their fruit from the front and the back without having to don full protective gear. And the adjacent grass and flowers can breathe easy.

In other berry news, the strawberries gamely continue to produce at the other end of the lawn in spite of some water issues I failed to address (namely: they weren't getting any).
The parents died off, but their children moved closer to where the sprinklers were hitting (or maybe it's normal that the older plants disappear? must research). They're a little easier to keep out of the grass, so I will try to get some more water in the direction I want them to grow.

This is all a lot of work! But it's nice to know that such labor does bear fruit. And tasty fruit it is.

Berry good gardener

Remember this "before" picture? Those are the raspberry canes that ate Colorado. Or at least the corner of my back yard.
Same canes tonight, when I was finally through with them:
Don't worry, they're not gone for good. It looks like there are three or four main plants, so I ripped out all the runners and dug up the volunteers that had gotten more established, but just trimmed back the main plants. I'll put in a heavy-duty root barrier around those, so I should be able to keep harvesting berries without giving up my yard to them. I might even try a chicken-wire cage for them, to keep them in one place.

We've got one nice day (i.e. 70 and sunny) for outside work left, and then it's supposed to be in the 30s and snowing the rest of the week. Gotta love the weather here.

Raspberry frozen yoghurt

Every time I photograph food, I learn something more. With freshly made frozen desserts, it's better to let them harden up in the freezer for a while so the scoops hold their shape and don't melt into a lump. Especially when you try to photograph them in a sunbeam.

But putting the frozen yoghurt into a pretty demitasse and adding garnish makes up for many shortcomings. And it still tastes good! Very intensely raspberry.

The cup and saucer are part of a set I brought back from China. I don't have much occasion to serve espresso (not having a machine), but I've used them for desserts and also for amuse bouche soups, such as roasted red pepper soup with a dollop of crème fraîche and a basil leaf.

Pretty in pink

The raspberry frozen yoghurt is even faster to make than the strawberry because there's no macerating necessary. Just throw everything in the blender and go.

It's surprising how long it takes to work it through a chinois to get the seeds out, though. I'll churn it in the morning.

Surprise, surprise

What with moving and unpacking and general lifestuff, I haven't had the time or inclination to do much gardening beyond maintenance: mowing and pulling weeds. And even then, I've concentrated mainly on the front yard. I let the back beds do their own thing, knowing that once everything dies back in the fall I'm going to rip much of it out, dismantle the raised beds and reconstruct the garden to my liking.

It's a jungle out there:
So imagine my surprise when I went out this morning to pick raspberries to make more frozen yoghurt and waded back into that jungle to find this:
Tomatoes!

They have to be volunteers; I know they weren't there when I moved in or I would have tried to keep them a little less choked. But clearly they are thriving:
So now I have a little harvest of toms, and a big harvest of raspberries:
I realized too late that I'd neglected to put the ice-cream maker's liner back in the freezer after I washed it, so no dessert until tomorrow.

Strawberry balsamic frozen yoghurt:The Money Shot

As promised in my last post. I don't have an ice cream scoop (another gadget for the list), but a melon baller worked nicely, especially when serving dessert in a champagne glass. The little spoon is from my East Bay Restaurant Supply haul. The Waterford glass and Havilland dish are from my great-grandmother's house; I have eight of the glasses and the entire set of dishes: 12 place settings of dinner plates, salad plates, saucers, bowls and serving dishes, all transported box-by-box as carry-ons every time I go home or Mom visits. I think there's maybe two boxes left. Awesome.

I kicked myself for not saving out a strawberry for garnish, but raspberries and mint from my yard are good stand-ins, and the raspberries provided a nice flavor contrast to the strawberry. Yes, I ate this as soon I was done shooting it. Very tasty! I think I will cut down on the sugar next time – the berries were plenty sweet to start with – and maybe up the balsamic; I couldn't really taste it.

Chillin' on a rainy day:Strawberry balsamic frozen yoghurt

It's 59 degrees and raining, so what am I doing? Making strawberry frozen yoghurt! You'd think I would have decided to get the frozen dessert bug earlier in the summer when it was in the 90s every friggin' day, but no.

Two things pushed me: the strawberry balsamic ice cream I had in San Francisco last week was so delectable, and then I happened to get a copy of David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop." It's been praised twice by Sam over at Becks & Posh (here and here). No figs at Safeway, but some pretty good-looking strawberries, cheap. If you don't have "The Perfect Scoop," David Lebovitz has posted the recipe here.

(I'll check Whole Paycheck Foods later this week for figs -- a couple years ago I found some there at $1 for a whole basket on the verge of going bad. I ate them all quickly to save them from such a sad fate, and felt virtuous.)
I was going to make ice cream, but the simplicity of the frozen yoghurt recipe appealed to me. Strawberries, sugar, yoghurt, lemon juice, and vodka or kirsch. The alcohol is optional, but a little splash of it helps keep the yoghurt from freezing too hard. I had no kirsch on hand, but vodka? Of course!
The recipe says to remove the stems and hull the strawberries. "Hull"? To me, that means "remove the skin or shell" (the hull), but I guessed that here it means "remove the hard white center part that doesn't taste like much."

If I'm wrong, let me know.

Trying to take this shot while balancing the camera on top of the yoghurt container (plus all the times I've had to brace the camera on something in low light for long exposures) has pushed me over the edge from "I should get a tripod" to "I'm going to the camera store today." I want a Gorillapod, so if the store doesn't have it, I'll order one from Amazon.
The strawberries macerate (are macerated?) for an hour on the counter and stirred occasionally. "Macerate" is a strange word; it feels like it should mean something active, like mashing, masticating or masturb ... er, something else. But it's just soaking/steeping. I should look up the etymology. Maybe later.

Then the strawberries go in the blender with the yoghurt and lemon juice. But I was thinking, OK, lemon's acidic, balsamic vinegar is acidic. Why not fig balsamic? So in that went. Into my classic Waring blender, bought for $5 at a rummage sale 20 years ago. Not bad!
I don't like strawberry seeds in my ice cream, so out came the chinois Mom brought back from France years ago. Thanks, Mom! I've now added one of those wooden pokey/mashy things to my mental wishlist of kitchen gadgets. In the meantime, a spatula works OK. Smoooooooth!

Then out came another gadget courtesy of Mom: the Donvier ice cream maker. Thanks, Mom! No salt, no ice, no electricity, no kidding.

It really is magic. You pour your ice cream mix in, turn the paddle a few times, then again every few minutes. Voilà, frozen treat.
The result was delicious, at least the little taste I got. I had to quick pack it in tupperware and toss it in the freezer; as usual, I pushed food prep right up until I had to go to work, with no time to enjoy what I'd made. But that's OK; it's waiting for me when I get home.

Next post: the money shot.

P.S. But for the sake of completeness after the fact, I'll post it here, too. Turned out great! Had to use raspberries with mint leaves for garnish since I forgot to save out a strawberry. I think I would use a little more balsamic next time, too. I used a melon baller to scoop and served in a champagne glass. This is super-delicious!

Berry bad gardener

The previous gardener at my home planted raspberry canes in one corner of the back yard – with no root barrier. What was she thinking?!?

Over the course of the summer, the canes have gone wild, and made significant inroads on the beds to either side, as well as invading the lawn. Today I got a pretty good harvest, but let's face it, the plants are more of a pain in the ass than the berries are a reward.

Come fall, I'm going to pull out the whole mess, and probably spend the next several years pulling the stragglers. It won't be fun; they're thorny as hell.