Dewberry Cobbler - Dessert for the Common Man

The dewberry season is about to be over and blackberry season will soon follow. Tricia and I got out and picked a bunch more the other afternoon and I have the scratched up hands to prove it.  Benjamin was theorizing why the biggest, plumpest, juiciest berries have to be in the most difficult places to get?  I mean, you almost have to be a contortionist, putting your arm in angles that are not normal to get between the thorns.  I told him that sometimes the best things in life are the things that you have to work the hardest to get.  Tricia made me laugh as she heard something moving in the bushes and decided she'd move to a different location to pick.  Some berries are easy to get, though, and arent' much trouble at all:

Right there for the pickin'

I told Tricia that I'm going to hang a bucket around my neck with a string so that I can use both hands to pick.  It'll go much faster and our productivity will improve.

That's a nice handful!

So what to do with some of these berries?  Well, how about a nice, warm Dewberry Cobbler?  Sounds good to me.  Reading through the Internet on various sites, I was looking for the reason that they call them cobblers.  I know cobblers are the old name for shoemakers, but what about this type cobbler?  Well, I learned that when the settlers came from Europe, they didn't have many of the ingredients they had at their disposal.  They improvised using what they had and a good example is the cobbler. Apparently they named it cobbler due to the crust that bubbles and forms an uneven surface, resembling the cobblestone streets that many of the cities and villages back in the old country had.

Tricia had a simple recipe she used that an old college roommate gave her many years ago:

Melt 3/4 stick butter in glass 13x9x2 pan.  Mix in 1cup flour, 3/4 cup sugar, pinch of salt, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 cup kefir or yogurt (or milk or cream), 1/2 cup fruit juice (i used pineapple juice).  Add 2 1/2 cups dewberries (or any fruit) on top. Sprinkle with cinnamon/sugar if you like. bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Here is the result of that amalgamation of ingredients as it came out of the oven, piping hot:

Mmmmm!

After supper, we got our bowls and spoons and lined up at the counter to serve up dessert.

Now we're talking!

A close-up shot:

A sight to behold, I declare

We were about finished with our first bowl when Tricia said, "I wish we had some homemade ice cream to go on top!"  I went to the fridge and did the next best thing. I poured the very top (the rich cream) off a quart jar of Daisy's milk into my bowl. You can see the result below.  

The world can be burning down around me and while I'm eating a warm bowl of dewberry cobbler, it almost appears that all is right with the world.

Fresh cream poured over warm Dewberry Cobbler

With cobblers, what you see is what you get.  There are no airs, no pretentiousness, no fancy garnishes like a fanned strawberry of even a sprig of mint.  It's just an enjoyable dessert for the common man - a man who might have his name on a patch sewn above the pocket on his work shirt, or a man who "brown-bag's it" to lunch most days, or a man who drives an old pickup truck, or a woman who washes and re-uses her Zip Loc bags, or a woman who doesn't have a frilly, lace apron, but instead cooks in a robe or old tee shirt. You get the idea, right?

Well, here's the damage assessment after me, Tricia, and Benjamin tore up the dewberry cobbler:

Leaving a job half finished?

So here's to the common man and Dewberry Cobbler!

Watch my Corn Pop up in Rows

Tim McGraw sings a country song with the following lyrics:

I'm gonna live where the green grass grows,

Watchin' my corn pop up in rows,

Every night be tucked in close to you.

Raise our kids where the Good Lord's blessed

Point our rocking chairs towards the west,

Plant our dreams where the peaceful river flows

Where the green grass grows.

I like the message of that song.  Yesterday afternoon I put the cows into a temporary paddock that I had set up in the yard and I strolled over to check on the progress of our sweet corn.  It has been pretty dry for the past few weeks, so I've been using the water hose to water the corn every afternoon.  When watering day before yesterday, I noticed some green shots.  As the water moistened the soil, you could almost watch the corn grow!

Let's check it out.  We have two long rows planted and as you can see, they are indeed popping up in rows now:

Healthy young corn

The bright green growth against the dull shades of the dirt and hay really stands out. This variety is called Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn.  The Sustainable Seed Company (www.sustainableseedco.com) website tells an interesting story about this variety:

Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn was originally developed by Nathaniel Newman Stowell of Burlington, New Jersey in 1848.  Stowell was a farmer and spent some years refining this variety, which he developed by crossing Menomony Soft Corn and Northern Sugar Corn.

In the fall of 1855, he sold just two ears of seed corn to a close friend for four dollars, on the agreement that the seed was for personal use only. Stowell's "friend" then re-sold the same seed for a whopping $20,000 to Thoburn and Company who released the variety commercially in late 1856.This delicious white sweet corn is regarded as the "King of All White Sweet Corn Varieties", has been popular for over 162 years.   Stowell's Evergreen matures slowly over a long period, extending the usual harvest and produces 9 inch ears with 16 to 20 rows of plump, sweet white kernels.

One of the things I learned from that is that Mr. Stowell should've picked his friends better.  For some reason that reminded me of a funny quote, "You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose." Off topic, I know.  Back on point, his friend was not a true friend and one might surmise that Mr. Stowell was more proficient in identifying good seed than good friends.

Sweet Corn Sprouting

This variety matures in about 100 days and will make a couple (or three) ears per stalk.  The stalks will grow up to twelve feet tall.  From past experience, this is the troubling thing.  We had a thunderstorm blow through last year that was accompanied by rains and strong straight line winds.  It knocked our corn flat on the ground.  You can read about that debacle by clicking here: Falling Flat

You live and you learn.  This year with two long rows, as the corn gets taller I'm going to put T posts around it and build a fence around it to provide support.  If the corn falls down before it tassels, the pollen won't be able to fall on the corn silk and fertilize it and you'll have blank rows of corn.  That's a valuable lesson I learned last year.

Below you can see the cows eating grass in the yard around the hay-mulched rows of corn.

Corn & Cows

Obviously as the corn gets bigger there's no way I'm trusting a single strand of wire to keep the cows away from the delicious cornstalks!

Once we've harvested the ears of corn, we always feed the stalks to the cows.  They absolutely LOVE them.  We absolutely LOVE eating the sweet corn.  In about 90 days, we'll do just that!

Look who wandered up in the yard today...

Tricia and I were moving the cows into the yard this afternoon and Benjamin was riding his scooter down the driveway, when something caught Tricia's eye running across the side yard.  It was this little fellow:

Baby Wood Duck

This is a baby wood duck.  There are lots of wood ducks around our neck of the woods and I assume that he (or she) must have fallen out of the nest.  Wood ducks normally lay their eggs in hollowed out tree limbs or anywhere that there is a hole in a tree. The little duckling was super healthy, running around like nobody's business.

Benjamin came running and picked him up.  Now he must have just fallen because we have two cats that are hunters and the neighbors, well, I can't even count how many cats they have.  I think they collect cats like one might collect stamps or coins. This little duckling wasn't going to make it and would end up being on the menu for the neighbor cat's supper for sure.  I walked around to see if I could find the nest, but had no luck. Benjamin, in the mean time, befriended him and named him Willie, after the CEO of Duck Commander.

Willie

Benjamin began searching the Internet to see how you care for a wild duck.  He went to the garden and dug up some small worms and began making a small cage into Willie's temporary home.  Funny thing is, we were just talking about ducks yesterday as Tricia was just talking to me about getting a few Muscovy Ducks for the pasture.

Here is Willie right where we found him, cruising around in the St. Augustine grass. It seems like he has huge feet - way too big for his little body and he follows Benjamin around the yard.  Benjamin brought him into the house and Willie was following him from room to room.  Tricia told him the it reminded her of the Dr. Seuss book, "Are you my mother?"  I thought that was funny!

Ol Willie where we found him

This was one excited dude right here to have this new friend waddle into his life.

I love my duck!

He put Willie into the rain bucket and he took to it, well, like a duck takes to water!

Swimming in the rain bucket

Benjamin got a nice little comfortable house for Willie set up and Willie promptly hopped up on top of the waterer.  He's an energetic little guy.

Willie, the duck, chilling out

I hope Willie will remain healthy and happy and we'll do our best to take care of him until he's able to re-enter the wild.

Local Strawberries

The dewberries in the roadside ditch on the north side of the road in front of our house have been producing prolifically and we have been picking them, eating them, and freezing them according to the individual quick freezing process we showed you the other day.  Dewberries are great and then nice thing about them is we don't have to plant them, water them, weed them or fertilize them.  They grow wild and we are blessed to have them right outside our front door.

We don't have any strawberries planted this year in the garden.  We generally try to grow as many things that we eat as possible.  For those items that we don't grow, we try to purchase items locally grown.  Every year we try to purchase strawberries from the 4-H Club.  They sell berries that are grown over in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Ponchatoula is a small town in Tangipahoa Parish that calls itself the strawberry capitol of the world.

Local Strawberries

These berries aren't the huge ones that you see in the grocery store, but they aren't small.  They are just a nice size.  The size isn't the most important thing here - its' the flavor.  When you take a bite of these, they are sweet and flavorful and are a beautiful red all the way through.

Delicious

When I put these in the car on my commute home, the strong fragrance of strawberries permeated the vehicle and I couldn't wait to get home and eat some.  We washed them and cut the green stem and leaves off the tops of the strawberries.  Then we laid them out on trays and froze them.  Once they were completely frozen, we poured them into gallon freezer bags.

We'll pull these out and make smoothies, pies, jelly, and other sweet delicacies.  So between the dewberries and strawberries, we've got a lot of berries in the freezer (and we haven't harvested our blueberries yet!)

Honeysuckle Honey

In yesterday's post we talked about honeysuckle and I mentioned that I would show you something that we learned to do with honeysuckle other that eat the nectar.  So why are we starting out showing you a ladder from an above-ground pool?  Well, read to the end.  It will all become clear in the end.

Above ground pool ladder

I searched around on the Internet and determined that you can actually make honeysuckle jelly.  Doesn't that sound interesting?  I thought so.  The recipe I found calls for 4 cups of loosely packed honeysuckle flowers. Tricia, Benjamin and I went out to the woods and quickly picked 4 cups of flowers off the honeysuckle vine.

4 cups Flowers

I put them in a colander and rinsed them off real good.

I got 4 cups of water boiling in a saucepan and then turned off the heat and poured all the honeysuckle flowers into the pot.  

Into the boiling water

Stir them up, put the lid on the pot and allow them to steep like tea for about 45 minutes.  Every once in a while remove the lid and stir.  Wow!  The fragrance that fills the kitchen is incredible!

Steeping honeysuckle flowers

Then pour through a strainer sieve to separate the flowers from the liquid.

Removing the flowers from the liquid

Out of four cups of flowers, this is all that's left.  I'll put this in the compost pile.

Honeysuckle flowers for the compost pile

Here is the honeysuckle infusion that we're left with

Honeysuckle Infusion

Now, take 2 of those four cups of infusion and return to the saucepan with the setting on medium high.  Add a quarter cup of lemon juice and 4 cups sugar to 2 cups of the honeysuckle infusion and keep stirring.  Once it comes to a boil, stir until the boil can't be stirred down.  Then add 1 box of Sure Jell and boil for an additional 2 minutes. 

Adding sugare and lemon juice and later, SureJell

Use a ladle and canning funnel, pour into the half pint jars.  Put gaskets, lids and rings on and submerge into a water bath canner for five minutes. After that, remove and set on a canning rack for cooling.  To me the color of this soon-to-be jelly is doing its best to imitate summertime sunshine.

Honeysuckle jelly on a cooling rack

The next morning I checked on the jelly, and...  None of it jelled!!  I was expecting jelly and it is instead about the consistency of honey.  What a disappointment!

Honeysuckle Honey

Unfortunately, not everything we try works out.  In fact quite a few things we try fail, but we keep on trying and we keep on learning.  We don't let any learning experiences go to waste.  We try not to let anything go to waste.  Which brings us to the ladder to the above ground pool you see below.  Someone discarded this ladder on the side of the road, I presume, when their pool broke.  We re-purposed it and use it as a ladder to cross over the fence to the pasture.

Similarly, we won't throw the failed honeysuckle jelly away.  We'll call it Honeysuckle Honey and it will be used as a sweetener when we make Sweet Sun Tea.  It seems only natural that a flower that blooms on summer afternoons will be used to sweeten tea that you sip on summer afternoons.

The Blooms of the Honeysuckle

One morning last week as we walked out to the barn to milk the cows, a wonderful fragrance wafted into my nose.  A fragrance that anyone who grew up in the country instantly recognizes - honeysuckle.  Honeysuckle was brought to America from Asia and quickly spread.  It is a very hardy vining plant that blooms in pairs with white flowers that fade to creamy yellow as they age.  The long flutes of the flowers make it perfect for hummingbirds to suck the nectar.

Honeysuckle by the barn in the back

But hummingbirds aren't the only creatures that like to suck the sweet nectar of the honeysuckle.  There's nary a country boy or country girl who hasn't enjoyed the sweet smell and taste of this plant.

If only this was a scratch and sniff.

So I brought Benjamin out to the back and demonstrated the fine art of extracting honeysuckle nectar.  First you carefully pick a flower off the vine, and then gently pinch the green tip of the flower, but don't pinch all the way through the 'style' (remember that from biology?).  The style is a long threadlike part of the flower.

Now gently pull on the style while holding the flower between your fingers.  The end of the style has something called the 'stigma' that acts as a stopper.  As you pull the style through the fluted flower, the stopper catches the nectar and pulls it through the flower.

Once you've pulled it almost to the end, you'll see a droplet of sweet honeysuckle nectar that you can drink. Don't be shy, now...  You don't get much, but each drop is so sweet.

Sweet!

Relish the sweetness as you sit there and savor the fragrance and sweetness of wild honeysuckle that reminds you of the simplicity and innocence of country living.

Mmmmmm...  Let's pick some more!

Check with us tomorrow as we'll show you something we learned to do with honeysuckle.  Something that you may not have thought of.  We sure hadn't.

How we store our fresh-picked Dewberries

Currently we have about 14 pounds of fresh dewberries picked after only two days. Correction:  We've eaten some and used some to make breakfast smoothies with kefir. So let's just say we have a good bit of dewberries and we'll likely pick some more today.  What do we do with all these berries?

We're eventually going to use a bunch of them to make dewberry jelly and I'll be posting the process again soon.  If you can't wait, you can read last year's blog post describing how we make dewberry jelly by clicking here.  But the question remains, what do we do with all these berries until we make jelly or eat them?

Bucket of ripe dewberries

We like to freeze them, but it is important to freeze them in a particular way so that they don't all freeze together in a lump.  You want them frozen in a way that you can measure out what you need for recipes. Back when I was in the grocery business, I learned about a process called IQF. IQF stands for Individually Quick Frozen. Companies put items like berries, peas, corn, chicken nuggets, etc. on a conveyor belt and run them through a blast freezer that freezes them very quickly so that they aren't all stuck together.  That's what we like to do with our berries.

Except that we don't have a conveyor belt or a blast freezer!  But where there's a will there's a way.  Here is our process.  We put our dewberries in the sink and soak in water.  (Ignore the box of baking soda.  The baking soda is just observing the washing process.  It plays no role in this.)  Little bugs and worms and leaves and straw will rise to the surface and you can scoop them out.  Agitate the berries and water to further remove any dust or debris, then remove from the water and spray down again in the sink.

Bathing the berries

Remove them from the sink and allow them to drip dry.  You can shake them gently to do this and this is a pretty good time to do some quality control, picking out damaged ones or unripened ones.

Berries are drying

Next take a shallow tray or pan with sides and pour a single layer of berries onto the surface and spread them out with your hands.

Arranging the berries on the tray

We've recently reorganized our outside freezer so we have room in there.  We place the tray of berries in the freezer.

Into the freezer

It takes around four hours for the berries to freeze solid.  Here is a pizza pan full of frozen berries that we removed prior to putting the new tray in.  You can see that they are frosted.  

Out of the freezer

All you have to do is move them around a little bit with your hands and you can pour them directly into a gallon Zip Loc Freezer bag.  They pour like marbles so be careful.

We'll fill up the freezer bags as much as we can and seal them.

And here we go.  So now when the recipe calls for 5 pints of berries to make jelly, you can easily pour them out and measure exactly what you need.  Or if you are making a smoothie, you can grab a handful and toss in your blender.  You can add to ice cream, make cobblers or pies, or snack on them too!

IQF Dewberries

So far we have four gallons of dewberries frozen like this.  I think we'll get a few more.  You can never have too many fresh frozen berries!