"blackberries" news and stories

Layered taco salad. Photo: YumSugar

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

Throw away the bowl and get striped with a layered taco salad.

Starbucks' VIA instant coffee will hit more stores on Sept. 29.

Pass up that standard rich, red sauce for a Rosemary Chicken Pizza.

Encapsulating fresh summer fruit in a boozy glass with a Blackberry Crush.

A picture guide to hosting an office baby shower.

Do foods ever end up in your cart simply because they're cute?

In the short, chilly days of November, it's nice to be reminded that raspberries, blackberries and blueberries were once heaped abundantly on the tables of farm stands and markets. I have two gallon-sized bags of blackberries squirreled away in my freezer, it might be time to pull those out and make something delicious with them.

Thanks lil'pic, for adding your photo to the Slashfood Flickr pool.

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There used to be this ridiculously cheap outdoor produce market nestled against a bubble tea shop that I would frequent. I would always come out of the place with bags of produce and fruit, and I would never have to spend more than $15. Sadly, the place is gone now, but I never forget it because I once picked up the most delicious box of blackberries there. They were juicy, sweet, and pretty much perfect. I have been thinking about that place a lot this summer, as I've been craving those tasty buggers for weeks.

And now I have the perfect excuse to buy them. Over at Steamy Kitchen, there's a so-very-delicious-sounding recipe for salmon with blackberry brandy sauce. Fish + blackberries + brandy = heaven! This is one of the greatest selection of favorite ingredients that I've seen in a while. Along with the above, there's dijon mustard, chili powder, and a nice helping of balsamic vinegar. How can you resist?

Now I just have to figure out when I'm going to make it, and what to pair it with.

Brambles are in season! What are brambles? Raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, swampberries, boysenberries, cloudberries, black caps, and any other wonderful members of the rose family that produce an aggregate berry. A recent trip to Kingston Point Park in Kingston, NY, had us eating almost everything we could pick.

The berries that grew at the point were what the locals here commonly call black caps. These are wild black raspberries. They are usually found on upright, thorny, raspberry canes, and look like a slightly smaller version of the commercial variety. The taste is excellent.

Amy and Alec found a nice stand of wild red raspberries, looking much like commercial ones, and a few bushes of the odd, maple-leafed, purple-flowering-raspberry near Esopus, NY. These are also upright plants and easy to locate. You can spot them well in advance in the Spring with their small, white, flowers. The purple flowering raspberry has a very showy rose-like purple flower.

Blackberries, dewberries, and swampberries, grow along runners tangled in the weeds. These berries have larger aggregrate parts than the raspberry-like fruits, just like store-bought blackberries.

As I mentioned in this post, my mom makes jam every summer. Most of what she cans comes from fruit that she and my dad pick themselves. The blueberries come from a Pick-Your-Own place on Sauvie Island, the plums comes from the yards of friends and the blackberries are typically come from a wild patch in the Columbia River Gorge. This year they drove out to the regular blackberry patch, only to discover that it had been cut back severely during some road work. They picked what they could and headed back to Portland, without enough berries to make a batch of jam.

The next night, they headed for a blackberry bramble in their neighborhood that my mom discovered one night while walking the dog, to see if they couldn't make up the difference. They started picking, wandering around a bit as you do when you are following the patterns of available berries. They had been picking for awhile, excited to have found a source of berries, when they heard a woman say, "Excuse me?" Looking up, they realized that they had inadvertently crossed over into someone's yard. She continued, "I was planning on making pie." My parents apologized (and were relieved to notice that there were still tons of berries left on the bushes) and headed home with what they had already picked (luckily, there was a plenty there for jam).

In this case, it was just an honest mistake. However, there have been times when my mom and I have been a little bit more deliberate in our foraging of fruit. Let's hear your stories of liberated fruits and vegetables.