July through September is the time of year when we should be savoring fresh raspberries. They grow wild all over different parts of the country. This past weekend, while driving through the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, I stopped at various farms to taste the raspberries. Each berry was bursting with tartness and sweetness.
This summer, I encourage you to revel in the raspberry season. Below are 8 ways you can incorporate raspberries into your diet:
Add raspberries to your cereal.
Puree raspberries with olive oil and drizzle over salads or grilled vegetables.
Happy 4th of July, Slashfood readers! In honor of today's holiday, I bring you a patriotic dessert from blogger/photographer Lelonopo for you to really feast your eyes on. She's created a blueberry and raspberry treat that isn't as aggressively red, white and blue as that famous flag cake, but is still appealingly thematic for the day.
I hope that everyone has a wonderful day today, filled with delicious food, awe-inspiring fireworks and safe, happy times. We look forward to seeing pictures of all the tasty things you created today, so make sure to take photos and upload them to the Slashfood Flickr pool!
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.
One of the things that says summer to me, more than hot weather, flip flops and the guys with coolers selling water bottles at stoplights and freeway exits is the ability to go fruit picking. I can't remember a single summer since I was 9 years old when I didn't find myself in a field of blueberry bushes, or carefully inserting myself further and further into a thorny blackberry bramble looking for the big, sweet berries.
The first few years I lived on the east coast, I planned a trip back to Portland that always happened to fall neatly during blueberry season (my mother's birthday coincides with ripe Pacific Northwest blueberries). Then last summer I headed to visit my parents in May and realized that if I didn't take matters into my own hands, I would miss out on picking. I started doing some research and found two farms that I absolutely love. This weekend, I'll be heading out to Mood's Farm Market near Mullica Hill, NJ to pick sweet cherries and early blueberries. I'm also planning a trip to Linvilla Orchards for raspberries in the very near future.
One of the things that helped me narrow down my u-pick choices was a guide that Metro Kids magazine (a Delaware Valley publication) put together last summer. They broke it down by state and so have a South Jersey guide, a Pennsylvania guide and a Delaware guide. When I'm in Portland, we always head out to Sauvie Island for all our u-pick needs.
I don't have much in the way of u-pick resources for the rest of the country, so I'm going to ask the rest of you to fill in the blanks. Where do you u-pick?
I am officially ready for spring to arrive. We've had little tastes of sunny, balmy weather out here in Philadelphia recently and it makes me long for warm days and farmers markets full of fresh, amazing produce. This picture of pints of blueberries and raspberries takes me straight to those summer days of bountiful fruits and vegetables. I want to crawl right in.
If you've taken food pictures that inspire these feels of wanting to crawl right into the scene, then you should come over and join us at the Slashfood Flickr Group.
A light panna cotta is a great way to end a romantic evening, like Valentine's Day. It is easy to prepare and can be set up in advance, which leaves you free to worry about other aspects of your night. When discussing panna cotta, "light" usually refers to the delicate texture and melt-in-your mouth appeal of the lightly gelled dessert, not necessarily to the fat or calorie content of the treat. There is nothing wrong with a little indulgence, but it's nice when a dessert that is light in texture is also light in the stomach, so I have made this panna cotta a little more figure-friendly by using yogurt and light cream (half and half) in place of the all-cream standard. I added some berries for color and a little bit of sugar for sweetness. The result is a dessert with the appealing texture of panna cotta, far less fat and the slight tang of yogurt.
When you think of Gazpacho, you probably think of hot summer days and refreshing cold soup. Unfortunately the weather where I am isn't cooperating with that theory, so let's just imagine that it is Valentine's Day with a hot fireplace instead. This soup is extremely versatile and can be served at various times throughout the day. It would be perfect for breakfast, lunch, or as a starting course for dinner. You can even use it as a dessert, adding a touch of ice cream for decoration. Personally I like to serve it with a few cinnamon sugar bread sticks, just to add a little more substance to an otherwise liquid meal.
It makes a great option for Valentine's Day because of the color and the obvious health benefits, while tasting as sweet and decadent as any dessert you could serve up. For full recipe and directions, click on the link below.
If you had asked me 15 years ago what I thought the healthiest foods were, I probably would have said salad, pasta, bread, rice, and water. If you had asked me 35 years ago, I probably would have said Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Quisp cereal, pretzels, Pepsi, and Sara Lee pound cake.
We all know better now, of course (for example, Sara Lee pound cake should only be eaten 20 or so times a week), but do we really know what the healthiest foods are? We've talked a lot about healthy foods before, but never like what you'll see after the jump...in video form! The video isn't the best quality, and waiting 30 seconds for the next food to be listed is rather annoying, but the info is interesting. Besides, it's like a game. You can take those 30 seconds to place bets with your friends! What will be next in the video...apricots? Avocados? Broccoli? Read on...
Yesterday I mentioned some really unusual chocolate chip flavors from Vosges, but I neglected to mention that they are not the only ones making a foray into unusually flavored chips. Nestle has previously released several types of swirled chocolate chips, their Tollhouse Morsels, including white chocolate, caramel and peanut butter swirled with the classic semisweet chocolate. They have two new flavors out now: chocolate mint and chocolate raspberry.
Of the two, the chocolate mint is the better option. The green color isn't the most appealing thing to find in a cookie, but the mint flavor is great in a chocolate cookie and mint chips aren't something you see to often.
Raspberry chips aren't something you see too often either - and for good reason. They taste like stale chocolate with cherry flavoring, though they smell heavily of artificial raspberry. It's possible that the flavor will blend in better once the chips are baked into a cookie, but I am finding it difficult to bring myself to use the raspberry chips.
There is also a red-and-green swirled white chocolate holiday chip that Nestle has put out for the holiday season. The colors, again, look a bit odd in a cookie, but the overall effect is quite festive and as long as you like white chocolate chips, you'll like them.
I have a food confession to make. When I was a kid, maybe from the ages of 9 to 13, I used to eat a ton of pound cake. My mom would buy one of those Sara Lee pound cakes, the ones that come cold and in that rectangular aluminum package, and I would eat the entire thing in one sitting. I'd grab it out of the fridge, get a knife and a napkin, and sit myself down in front of the television and eat it all. Usually with milk but often with a Pepsi. Yes, Pepsi.
That came to mind today after seeing this recipe at RachaelRay.com: a Grilled Pound Cake with Berry Sauce. I haven't eaten pound cake in probably 20 years, but this has me wanting it again. I've never had it hot before in any way, so this recipe, where you butter the bread and grill it in a pan and top it off with raspberries and/or blueberries, sounds intriguing.
A few days ago, our man Joe posted about the findings from a new study that singled out blackberries as having the highest concentration of antioxidants per 1 cup serving. In fact, blackberries were getting all kinds of love from the press. With all that attention, my guess is that there was a run on blackberries at the market.
But nobody seemed to notice that the abstract for the actual study also listed raspberries, pecans, and ground cloves as part of the top ten of the 1,000 foods that were tested. Hey! Why no love for the raspberry? If you're eating a bowl of blackberries for their antioxidants, it might be even more worthwhile to toss in some raspberries and pecans. As for the ground cloves...well, I'll leave that for Holiday baking.
In addition to simply having high concentration of antioxidants, raspberries' antioxidant capacity comes from ellagitannins, which are a family of anti-cancer compounds that almost exclusive to the raspberry. Beyond phytonutrients, raspberries also provide nutrition in the form of manganese and vitamin C.
That's right. Nobody puts rasp-baby in the corner.
The best time to dig into a bowl full of ice cream or sorbet is when it is just beginning to melt. At that point, the flavors are stronger and the texture of the treat is at its creamiest. This photo of raspberry sorbet from Mommy Cooks seems to capture that moment between melting and frozen perfectly. The homemade sorbet is as brightly flavored as it is brightly colored, and it is easy to make. Adding fresh berries on top of the dish at serving time adds a final touch to a beautiful dish, although it might be hard to save berries if they look that perfect; I tend to eat them by the handful whenever they come within arm's reach.
A recent MSNBC story by dietitian Karen Collins explains why berries have recently been given 'superfood' status. Collins outlines berries' richness in antioxidants like vitamin C--a cup of strawberries has at least a whole RDA. She also touches on other cancer-inhibiting phytochemicals such as the anthocyanins found in red berries and pterostilbine, found in blueberries. The latter is similar to the often-hyped phytochemical found in grapes and red wine. Like and level-headed dietitian, Collins is quick to stress the importance of eating not just lots of berries, but a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and grains, all of which can provide phytochemicals that may work together to your benefit.
Because I love to cook, it is easy to make any meal made at home romantic. All you need is a couple of candles on
the table, well-cooked food, someone special and, to follow the meal, dessert. For the main course, I would
choose something easy to make, something familiar. Dessert would be my focus, since I firmly believe that anything
truly romantic should end with something sweet. These are my top four most romantic desserts:
Molten Chocolate Cake - Known sometimes as a chocolate lava cake, these individual serving sized
cakes are menu must haves on Valentine's Day. Unfortunately, they are often poorly made, as people simply undercook a
regular chocolate cake to "create" a molten center; all they are doing is allowing batter to run all over the
plate. A real molten chocolate cake should have a ball of ganache placed in the center before baking, which will melt
and deliver a delicious sauce that is more delicious than any cake batter could ever be. This recipe from Epicurious substitutes chocolate pieces for the truffle center, but the Chocolate Espresso Lava Cakes are excellent,
nevertheless.
Some 
If you had asked me 15 years ago what I thought the healthiest foods were, I probably would have said salad, pasta, bread, rice, and water. If you had asked me 35 years ago, I probably would have said Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Quisp cereal, pretzels, Pepsi, and Sara Lee pound cake.
Yesterday I mentioned some really 
I have a food confession to make. When I was a kid, maybe from the ages of 9 to 13, I used to eat a ton of pound cake. My mom would buy one of those Sara Lee pound cakes, the ones that come cold and in that rectangular aluminum package, and I would eat the entire thing in one sitting. I'd grab it out of the fridge, get a knife and a napkin, and sit myself down in front of the television and eat it all. Usually with milk but often with a Pepsi. Yes, Pepsi.
A recent MSNBC 
DIY Foods: Making homemade sausage
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
