Blackberry Tyranny

Purple fingers, purple stove. Blackberry juice EVERYWHERE! The berries are ripening down by the pond, which means that I had to do something with the eleventy-billion ziplock bags of LAST YEAR'S blackberries. It's hard to pass up free food, but I do hate the process.

I took about 20 quarts of berries, cooked them down to a mush, smooshed it all through a food mill, then sieved the guck through a fine-mesh screen, scraping and shaking and smashing, and ended up with about 5 quarts of blackberry puree.

Now you're thinking "yeah, and what does that get you?"

I'm thinking sauce-flavoring for venison, blackberry vinegar for salad dressing, blackberry sorbet in the ice cream maker, and as a last resort, blackberry jam. It's almost even seedless. Sort of. As much as I could stand. Then there's the washing up of the stove, the counters and all the pots and pans and sieves and spoons. My fingers will be purple for a week. I look like I had a fight with an old-fashioned ditto machine.

While the blackberry project was going on, I took inventory of the freezer. Given my penchant for buying any meat that's on sale, I don't need to buy meat for about another year. And I did the laundry in between the puree-making. And I even sat down and watched some episodes of Smallville and knitted a few rows of the never-ending sweater.

Not a bad weekend at all.

I can't remember it ever being this hot and humid in June. August, yes. It's 9 am, and about 90 degrees out there. Time to go exercise the lunatic canine, before it gets even hotter...