This time of year berries are cheap in the
supermarket, available at farmers markets and at their peak. I’m never
sure which berry is my favorite. I have so many summer memories of
eating cobblers, pies, breads and muffins with these succulent summer
fruits. I am just as fond as eating them plain, enjoying the simple
pleasure of popping berries one by one into my mouth. Maybe a little old
fashioned, but I am nostalgic with berries, remembering many summers
picking the sweet treats with family or friends. While other children
watched Saturday morning cartoons, while most college kids slept late on
Saturdays, when most youth took for granted that berries grew in the
fridge, I was able to pick them and share time with loved ones.
When I was little our family picked blackberries in
the summer. They were first ripe on Mother’s Day, when we drove into the
country to find our secret patch of wild berries on an overgrown fence
in a pasture. We would fill empty buckets, or used ice cream containers
or Tupperware, whatever mom gave us that had a handle, and spend summer
mornings browsing over prickly vines and snacking on the sweet dark
berries while staining our hands and t-shirts and bemoaning the thorns
on the wild vines.
In college, my roommate cherished mid-summer for
its blueberries. We had a professor who had a grove of blueberry trees
in his backyard and ran it as a part-time profit with you-pick days. We
would load up in the car, curb our hangovers with McDonald’s breakfast,
and kill a few early hours in the orchard chatting over homework, future
careers and the latest dates we had. We filled baskets and paper
containers brimming with blueberries, took them home and made muffins,
pies, and of course invented blueberry cocktails, such as vodka lemonade
with frozen blueberry ice.
Now strawberries grow locally and it’s a great
early-summer adventure to go to a farm and scavenge for the red telltale
warm weather fruits among the low vines. They of course are perfect for
dessert, or maybe even breakfast, sliced served atop fresh shortcake and
a dollop of cream.
I’ve never lived anywhere that cherries grew, but I
would love to pick them direct from their source. I can never decide if
I like dark red cherries or the more vibrant yellow Rainer cherries.
Either way, they make the perfect snack, or if you’re in the mood for a
little more labor, they are great pitted and stirred into sweet cakes or
even tossed into a spicy salsa to round out a fish dinner.
I also like to buy packs of raspberries, open them
and eat each berry one by one. When I was little I would squeeze each
berry onto the tip of my finger and wear the bright, dark pink berries
as fingernails before eating each one off. I still eat them like little
pieces of sweet tart candy, but I usually forgo the fingernail part.
Perhaps part of the sweetness of these summer time
favorites are the memories that I conjure upon crushing a berry on my
tongue, letting the juice splash and the flavor seep into my mouth.
While they’re ideal for baking into desserts, I hate turning on the oven
in warm weather, and I prefer to eat my berries raw, as they grow in the
wild.
