Their Words/Your Hands: Blackberry Season

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

- Seamus Heaney, Blackberry Picking

Blackberry season comes earlier here in DC than in Ireland; the dregs of our first batch from the farmer’s market just succumbed to rot.  Fortunately, most of them made it into our greedy mouths. Another batch went into the below recipe for Blackberry Pistachio Icebox Cake, which I made yesterday for a work pot-luck.

Blackberry Pistachio Icebox Cake

1 1/2 cups heavy cream, chilled
1 1/2 teaspoons rose water
1/4 cup sugar
A couple of packets of tea biscuit cookies, or whatever absorbent, not-too-sweet wafer you find lying around (I used the Caramel/Toffee flavor of pizzelle from Whole Foods)
3 cups blackberries, sliced in half
2/3 cup unsalted pistachio nuts, toasted and roughly chopped
1/4 cup pomegranate molasses (or more, to taste)

In a large bowl, combine cream, rose water, and sugar. Use electric mixer to whip mixture on high speed until it holds stiff peaks.

Line the bottom of an 8x8 baking dish (or whatever size you have handy) with wafers. Spread on one quarter of the cream. Sprinkle one quarter of the blackerries and pistachios on top, and finish with a drizzle of pomegranate molasses. Repeat for four layers.

Cover and chill in refrigerator for at least 6 hours or overnight.


Brazenly stolen and slightly reworded from Max Falkowitz’s recipe on Serious Eats

Ode to Odors

Every year around this time I give in to my nose at the farmers market and take home an enormous armful of some good-smelling plant or bush.  Last year it was lilacs:

Yep, that's Caddyshack in the background.  It was a good afternoon.

We somehow missed the lilacs this year so this weekend I compensated with an enormous bouquet of mock orange blooms.  They're pretty simple-looking flowers, but they smell a lot like honeysuckle and the bunch was so enormous that it practically functioned as a parasol as I was walking through the market.  When we got the bouquet home and into water, it looked like we planted a bush in the middle of our apartment:

This is an awful picture.  iPhone & apartment-cleaning fail.

The flowers were also a good excuse to play around with our new camera:

I am still getting the hang of this whole "focusing" thing.

But!  The plot thickens.  After I brought home my lovely mock orange branches (which, by the way, are you supposed to just lop off huge amounts of branches of a bush/tree just for the flowers?  This makes me feel kind of bad), my infinitely resourceful future husband chose the same afternoon to pickle ramps in our kitchen approx. 5 feet away.  I don't usually mind the acrid smell of vinegar wafting through our small apartment, but this aggression against my fragile dewy blossoms would not stand!  E has a notoriously awful sense of smell, so he didn't have any problem with the situation, plus he had just cleaned the kitchen a bit so I couldn't be too annoyed with him.  Instead, I took a nap, and then a shower, because these are good things to do when one is annoyed for a petty reason, and then I cleaned all the pickling stuff and opened all the windows. And all was well.

In retrospect, I was going to spin this as a victory on my part but I think all I succeeded in doing was being pouty for an hour or so and then solving the problem myself in under 15 mins.  Which is kind of a victory, I guess?  Anyway, the vinegar smell is long gone.  The blossoms still smell delicious and are only just starting to blanket their white petals over everything we own. And the ramps look pretty good too.

The end.